Layers of Complexity: Alec Soth profile for Aesthetica

The Minneapolis-born photographer has become synonymous with the American landscape, traversing its diverse geography for over two decades.

© Alec Soth

© Alec Soth

On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the USA. On 21 January 2020, the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Washington state. By this time, Alec Soth (b. 1969) couldn’t bring himself to make work about America. Unable to move freely, consuming news bul- letins on the TV or stories on the internet, he was appalled. Things are, in many ways, even worse now than they were back then.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, this year there have been four mass shootings every week. In each case, at least four people have been injured or killed exclud- ing the shooter. The deadliest of these so far was on 24 May, when a man in Uvalde, Texas, opened fire at a school, kill- ing 19 children and two teachers. Exactly a month later, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned the land- mark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, causing global uproar.

Soth is known for making beautiful, tender and lyrical images about America, from Sleeping by the Missis- sippi (2004) to Niagara (2006) and up to his most recent series, A Pound of Pictures (2022). Soth has, to widespread acclaim, managed to connect disparate images of people and places into large-scale visual symphonies that speak to one another. Featured subjects include Julie in Austin, Texas, with tousled golden hair; Charles in Vasa, Minnesota, who, dressed in overalls, clutching a model plane in each hand; Melissa, the bride who sits in quiet contemplation outside the Flamingo Inn in Niagara Falls; and Bill, an elderly gentleman from Sandusky, who smiles as he dances alone across the floor of a community hall in Ohio.

These subjects share more than geography. They are connected by a difficult-to-articulate, but nonetheless unmistakable, sensibility…