We began with Alec Soth, who welcomed the new year from St. Paul, Minnesota. Gueorgui Pinkhassov showed us Moscow, from a candlelit Orthodox Christmas celebration and a look at life across the city. Dominic Nahr documented his trip home, to Hong Kong, to visit his mother, and Bieke Depoorter took her first trip to northern Norway. Finally, Jacob Aue Sobol’s portraits of Milwaukee brought us full circle, back to the Midwest. Here’s a look at highlights from the month
The photographer Alec Soth and the writer Brad Zellar have undertaken a long-term project, born out of simple pleasure, that captures both the humanity and banality of the American continent. Their self-described “North American ramblings” are presented in an irregularly published newspaper titled The LBM Dispatch, which recalls the documentary-style photography of days long gone. Soth describes it as “being in the style of both newspaper journalism and the Walker Evans/James Agee approach in ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ ”
The photographer Alec Soth published a book this month consisting of vintage table-tennis photos collected from eBay and elsewhere, accompanied by a conversation between the Ping-Pong-obsessed writers Pico Iyer and Geoff Dyer. Table tennis is “a way to do a physical sport that has actual athletic qualities but is kind of contained,” says Soth, who plays every day in his studio. “There’s a real mental element to it. It’s not chess, but your brain is engaged. It’s a break from neuroses.”
The long journey that I made at the age of nineteen in search of the Gypsies was my photography school and a school of life. They taught me that there’s always a solution, that we must never give up, that there’s always hope
[Part 1 is here] by Jonathan Blaustein Jonathan Blaustein: You’ve got a publishing company, LBM, that you started in 2008. Is that right? Alec Soth: Correct. JB: It’s based in Minneapolis. You built a team of collaborators, and a print studio. How did tha
We’re continuing that project, and we’re using the Guggenheim funds to expand it in difficult-to-fund regions. We’re doing Texas, and it’s easier to get funding there, than some place like Idaho. It’s a very expensive project because there are three of us traveling, and I pay Brad. Then we produce the newspaper
by Jonathan Blaustein Jonathan Blaustein: When did you first start taking photographs? When did it all begin? Alec Soth: In high school, I had this experience that a lot of people have. I had a great teacher that woke me up. In that case, he was a paintin
I just feel really strongly now that being a creative person means being creative with your life. It doesn’t mean being creative with this one particular activity that you do. Now I see that running a business is a creative activity. How you organize your daily schedule is a creative activity. You can be creative and entrepreneurial in all sorts of different ways.
A week afterward Alec Soth’s lecture last Friday is still reverberating in my head. I’d been told beforehand that he never gives the same talk twice, that he’s loose with structure, maybe even approaching ADD in his fondness for wandering
Last week at the Portland Art Museum as part of the 2013 Photolucida festivities, Alec Soth gave a lecture titled “From Here to There: Searching for Narrative in Photography.” The talk could have been titled “Searching for Narrative in Photography Lecture
Prompted by the audience, Soth spoke about a period of time when he was sick of photography, because “the production of the thing got in the way of wandering.” Soth tried to find a cave to buy so he could disappear
2.8.13 Design Director: Arem Duplessis Director of Photography: Kathy Ryan Art Director: Gail Bichler Deputy Art Director: Caleb Bennett Deputy Photo Editor: Joanna Milter Photo Editors: Stacey Baker, Clinton Cargill, Amy Kellner Designers: Sara Cwynar, R
I used to need solitude in the car. All of my early work was made while driving alone. When I worked with writers or assistants, I felt self-conscious. But over the years, a lot of that has dropped away. Lately I prefer having other people in the car with me. It helps dampen my solipsistic inclinations.
A few years ago I became really frustrated with photography. In order to continue working, I felt like I needed to take apart my process and to examine things before putting them all back together. One of the things I did was make re-creations of other people’s photographs
We might as well admit now that photographs don’t tell stories the way words do it. Words tell stories very, very slowly. You need to read them one at a time, and the story then slowly builds. A photograph, in contrast, is not the equivalent of one word. If we stay with Soth’s phrase, a photograph is “a minute fragment of an experience, but quite a precise, detailed, and telling fragment.” Thus looking at one photograph after another would be to read a novel by somehow taking in larger chunks of pages at a time
Alec Soth’s newest book Looking for Love, 1996 is, in its way, about both—the search for love guided by the heart and the search of love guided by the eye.
Please Join us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Somewhere-to-Disappear/148561295180713 Take a road trip adventure across America with renowned photographer…
Members of Magnum Photos held their annual general meeting this week at the Rencontres D’Arles photo festival in France, and selected three new nominees for the photo collective. The three are varied not only in their experience but in the kind of work th
The work of these three photographers might represent the different kinds of work now produced by Magnum members. Two years ago when we reported on Magnum’s choice of two news photographers as nominees, Alec Soth, a Magnum photographer, wrote us to say: “One of the reasons I wanted to be in Magnum is because of the diversity of approaches to the medium. There is such a broad spectrum within the agency that these lines between ‘art’ and ‘photojournalism’ have blurred beyond recognition.”
A recent post by Blake Andrews on dead photoblogs has me thinking a lot about life online and off. From 2006 to 2007, I poured a lot of energy into my blog. On my first post, I wrote that I was ‘hu…
And one commenter, John Gossage, tossed a couple follow-up questions back at me:
“Is there one book in your list that changed you as an artist? One of these that allowed you to take something from it that you could use to move forward?”
In the era where retweeting and ‘liking’ is the most interaction I normally expect online, Gossage’s question provoked me to go deeper. And so I did. I looked over my list and asked myself Gossage’s questions. The answers are complicated (several of the books changed me in incremental ways). But since this is a blog post, and not a conversation, I’ll try to keep it simple. The book that changed me the most this year was, in fact, not on my list
Here LightBox spotlights some of the best photobooks of the year as chosen by a group of photographers and photography experts from around around the world…. and of course a few from the photo editors of TIME. From the selection one can see the art of the photobook continues to flourish in all genres from reportage to fine art photography, fashion and everything in between. This year’s books range from luxurious tomes like Catherine Opie and Alec Soth’s collaboration for Rodarte to smaller precious books like Fred Hunning’s Drei. Overall the selection shows that even as masses of information come at us from all our digital devices, people still enjoy a singular vision and the process of sitting down with a good book—especially one that pushes the boundaries of the format. Herewith, the photobooks we loved the most in 2011
While reviewing my favorite photobooks of the year, I noticed that numerous selections could be classified as crime stories. So in creating this year’s list, I thought it would be an entertaining e…
While reviewing my favorite photobooks of the year, I noticed that numerous selections could be classified as crime stories. So in creating this year’s list, I thought it would be an entertaining exercise to categorize all of the books by genre. Given the quantity and quality of books being published, it is now feasible to think of photobooks in much the same way as we think of literature and cinema. These genre pigeonholes are reductive, of course, but like year-end lists, they are mostly a lighthearted excuse to analyze and discuss quality work.
