Interviews / Essays / Quotes


Interviews


April 2007: Interview by Paul Laster: Artkrush

August 2006: Conversation with Roger Richards: The Digital Filmmaker

August 2006: Interview with Jörg Colberg: Conscientious

April 2006: MPR interview: After the Falls

April 2006: Walker Art Center blog: The Binoculographer

March 2006: PDN Online: Catching Up With Alec Soth.

July 2005: Conversation with Andrei Codrescu at the Walker Art Center

June 2005: Tom Crann's interview for Minnesota Public Radio:
The art of taking someone's picture

August 2004: Seesaw Online Magazine: The Mississippi


Essays

Transcript of Michael Fallon's analysis of Alec Soth : Portraits

Transcript of Glenn Gordon's analysis of Alec Soth : Portraits

Cynde Randall's essay on Alec Soth : Portraits (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota)

Anne Wilkes Tucker's essay from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi

Karen Irvine's essay on Sleeping by the Mississippi
(Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois)

Apsara DiQuinzio's essay on Sleeping by the Mississippi
(2004 Whitney Biennial Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art)

John Ruskey's essay on Sleeping by the Mississippi
(Daylight Magazine)


Quotes

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


Alec Soth is clearly working within and expanding on the tradition of the lyrical documentary which his photographs so clearly honor and advance. I know of no other photographer in his age group who surpasses his eloquence and poignant sense of place. His mastery of the medium has always been notable, and his eye for the telling nuance, gesture and inflection exceptional.
Ted Hartwell, Curator of Photography, Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2003


Alec Soth has a wonderful and terrifying eye. We’ve all seen gritty documentary photography, but no one has ever seen anything like his work!  It’s gritty for sure, but it’s beautiful–really beautiful.  With most documentary photography, you look at it, sigh, and pass on, but Soth’s work keeps pulling you back to look again because he composes with the skill of the greatest of photographic artists.
John Wood, Editor 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography 2004


It has that wonderful richness of a grand idea yet the story is in the details. He's captured elements of our American-ness that moved me on a totally personal level, yet he's able to take the ordinary and transform it through his perception to a higher plane so it has meaning to others.
Anne Tucker, Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston 2003


Alec Soth startles the sleepers along the Mississippi for a brief but profound moment; they open their eyes to his camera just long enough to reveal the immemorial, often dreamless, sometimes hopelessly trashy quality of their sleep, then sink back into the mud of their impecunious marginality. Alec Soth's visual journey has the decency (or affection) to disturb none of his subjects, though he disturbed me, a viewer, plenty.
Andrei Codrescu, poet and NPR contributor 2003


The much-touted "find," from this year is Alec Soth, a 34-year-old Minnesota photographer favouring large Chromogenic colour prints from his series, Sleeping By The Mississippi. These are gorgeous pieces, their formality leavened by just a hint of something twisted.
Peter Goddard, Toronto Star 2004


Alec Soth has done something that has changed the course of the medium that will be followed.
Joel Sternfeld, Art Review Magazine 2004


Soth's project is a classic photographic quest and his results have an impressive heft and breadth.
Vince Aletti, Village Voice 2004


Writers such as Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain are all brought to mind by Soth’s sympathetic portraits of the eccentrics, outcasts and lost souls that he encountered in his travels...[his work] shows a poise and authority that is nothing short of remarkable.
Christopher Phillips, Art in America 2004