PHOTO:Alec Soth-I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating

Alec Soth is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis. His work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of “on-the-road photography” developed by photographers like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. Concerned with the mythologies and oddities that proliferate America’s disconnected communities, Soth has an instinct for the relationship between narrative and metaphor. His clarity of voice has drawn many comparisons to literature, but he believes photography to be more fragmented; “It’s more like poetry than writing a novel”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Foam Archive

Alec Soth has become known as the chronicler of life at the American margins of the United States. He made a name as a photographer with his 2004 series “Sleeping by the Mississippi”, encountering unusual and often overlooked places and people as he travelled along the river banks. His most recent project “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating”, is the result of this personal search, and marks a departure from Soth’s earlier work. The starting point for the project “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating” was a portrait Alec Soth made in 2017 of the then-97-year-old choreographer Anna Halprin in her home in California. The interaction with this exceptional woman in her most intimate surroundings meant a breakthrough for Soth. Instead of focusing on a place, a community or demography, he concentrated on individuals and their private settings. Unlike many of Soth’s previous visual narratives, the choice of geographical location was not preconceived, but the result of a series of chance encounters. As Soth put it himself: “When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, glimpse their interior life”. The sometimes desperate desire for human contact, or lack thereof, is a theme that runs throughout Soth’s work. In an attempt to approach his subjects, Soth worked at the sitters’ homes with a slow large-format camera, almost exclusively using natural light. This laborious approach to photography is time-consuming and requires the subject to remain still in the presence of the photographer for extended periods. In addition to spending time, Soth used space as another way to overcome (or emphasise) the distance that inevitably exists between photographer and photographed. While windows and doors create a sense of detachment in the photographs, they simultaneously mark a point of entry from the outer to the inner world. The result is an intimate and often contemplative image; a photograph like a day dream. Soth’s photographs have been compared with poetry. His photo series lack a clear linear narrative. Through omission and suggestion, ample room is left to the imagination. The series title “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating” is derived from the 1917 poem “The Gray Room” by Wallace Stevens, in which subtle and superficial observations lead one to suspect fiery emotions below the surface. As in Stevens’s poem, Soth’s portraits and still-lifes suggest an inner life that is as rich as it is unreachable.

Info: Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 11/9-6/12/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org