Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What’s the point?
There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description—a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer’s reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description—a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer’s reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
[Photography is] very related to poetry. It’s suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It’s as much about what you leave out as what you put in.
It’s a weird combination that makes a great picture. It’s a complete mystery to me.
Try everything. Photojournalism, fashion, portraiture, nudes, whatever. You won’t know what kind of photographer you are until you try it.
