There’s No Place Like Nome | VICE | United States

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by

Trent
in

There’s No Place Like Nome

Photographer Alec Soth ventured to Nome, Alaska, a deeply American place created by outsiders for outsiders, to capture the frontier rawness of the “Sin City of the North.”

via Vice: http://www.vice.com/read/theres-no-place-like-nome-0000686-v22n7

In 2003, a 19-year-old Native American woman was found dead in an abandoned gold mine in Nome, Alaska. Two years later, Nome police officer Matthew Clay Owens was convicted of her murder. Soon after his arrest, I was sent to photograph Nome for a magazine that went out of business before my essay was published. The place has haunted me ever since. More than any other location I’ve been to in the US, Nome evokes a feeling of frontier rawness. When VICE asked me if there was a place I wanted to photograph, my first choice was to return to Nome.