PHOTO:Alec Soth-The Space Between Us

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: OCAT Xi’an Archive

Alec Soth presents “The Space Between Us”, his first solo exhibition In China. The exhibition is not a fully retrospective exhibition, but presents a total of 44 representative works from the major series “Perfect Strangers”, “Looking for Love”, “Sleeping by the Mississippi”, “Niagara”, “Broken Manual”, “Songbook”, and his latest “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating”. The selection allows viewers to follow his emotional and physical journeys and the creative path he has taken through different periods of his work. A unique aspect of Soth’s work lies in his exploration of how to photograph people. Using photography as a medium to record an encounter, Soth pays particular attention to observing ordinary people against the background of the times, particularly the mundane nature of their social life, creating a delicate chemical reaction between himself and the subject. Soth enjoys walking into a person’s life, whether to step into their living space or shoot some detail of their environment. By using the depth of field and focal points to direct the viewers’ attention, at all times, Soth is carefully examining the space between himself and the subject. Soth uses his process to highlight the importance of digging into life, demonstrating that by capturing intimate scenes photography can express as strong a world view as by photographing grand public events. A patient observer, he spends a lot of time with each of his subjects. The works often present a sense of poetry beyond the still image. An aura of intimacy and solitude is everywhere in Soth’s works and is a unifying feature of his visual language. The nostalgic, melancholy emotions he captures offer a powerful, warm sense of comfort in what has become a time of uncertainty. Soth’s perspective on society and ordinary people, the way he injects this into his photographs, has had a profound impact on an entire generation of young photographers today. By putting himself among the masses, as one of them, everyone can see themselves through Soth’s work. Since his debut series “Sleeping by the Mississippi” 2004, Alec Soth created an immediate stir the same year of its release at the Whitney Biennial. Soth was invited to join Magnum Photos in 2006, and through his own imprint Little Brown Mushroom, as well as in collaboration with others, has published over 25 photo books to date. 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.

PHOTO: Alec Soth, Signed on verso, Archival pigment print, Edition of 9 plus 4 artist’s proofs, © Alec Soth, Courtesy the artist and OCAT Xi’an

Info: OCAT Xi’an, Xixian Fengdong Cultural Center, Feng River Eas Road, Xi’an , Duration: 13/1-30/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.ocat-xian.org.cn