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| Essays on Sleeping by the Mississippi Anne Wilkes Tucker's Afterword for Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi monograph  Karen Irvine's essay for the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois Apsara DiQuinzio's essay for the 2004 Whitney Biennial Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art) John Ruskey's essay for Daylight Magazine James Frey's essay for Blackbook Magazine |
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| Praise for Sleeping by the Mississippi Sleeping by the Mississippi unfolds like the river itself – meandering but entirely vivid, with ominous signs of the strong emotional currents that drive people’s lives. The work is a deeply personal travelog that includes portraits, landscapes, and interior still lifes in a way that transcends standard photographic labels. Jeffrey Elbies, American Photo Soth's work represents an old-fashioned kind of imagemaking, fitting into a long line of itinerant photographers running from Carleton Watkins to Robert Frank. Judging from the hyperactive reception to Soth's work, the art world is eager to annoint a new generation of fresh, road-ready practioners...These are scrupulously accomplished photos. Jonathan Raymond, ArtForum What Soth found along the Mississippi was a full range of fugitive atmospheres and human eccentricities. The mood in his pictures can be drowsy, lonely, lyrical and sometimes just a bit surreal...like a painting, or at least a good one, Soth's photographs have layered meanings. Richard Lacayo, TIME Magazine 2004 In short, the trip is an encounter with fame, sex and salvation, three of the great American passions, and with landscapes and interiors, equally ruined and haunted. The final image in Mr. Soth's book, of a metal bed frame lying half-submerged in Mississippi River swamp weeds, adorned by a few white flowers, is the perfect coda to the series: a kind of dream-memorial to a strange, sad tale persuasively told. Holland Cotter, The New York Times 2004 Alec Soth's series of color prints explores one of the underlying geographic and identity assumptions that has shaped the American experience. He does so in a manner that projects a confidence and restraint. The result is a body of work that is both compelling and conceptually relevant. Tim Wride, Associate Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2003 His images have an unworldly clarity that comes close to ennobling his modest subjects. At the very least, his technique rejects the casualness that comes with shooting from the hip, and injects an Old Master formality into his photographs. Blake Gopnik, Washington Post 2004 Building on the school of photography practiced by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld, Soth has found a brooding sexuality, an eccentric beauty, and an overwhelming sadness in the people and places along the river. The New Yorker 2004 |
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