Rooted firmly in the narrative framework of traditional photographic expression, for more than 20 years Alec Soth has pushed the boundaries of the medium, guided by existential questions to pursue open-ended, long-term projects. Since the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials, which coincided with the publication of his widely influential first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has stood out as a vibrant and distinctive voice in contemporary photography. Fraenkel Gallery began representing Soth in 2013, and since then has presented five solo exhibitions of his work.
In 2015, Fraenkel Gallery exhibited Songbook, a selection of photographs taken around the country while Soth was working on The LBM Dispatch, a self-published newspaper made in collaboration with journalist Brad Zellar, named after Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom arts organization. Seeking out examples of real-world social interactions during an era marked by the rise of virtual social networks, Soth photographed meetings, dances, festivals and family gatherings. The exhibition and monograph presented the images without context, highlighting the longing for connection at their root. “Governed by lyric rather than logic, the photographs are poetic things,” wrote Lucy Davies about the series in the British Journal of Photography. Viewed without captions, the images remain “visually absorbing even without us knowing exactly what it is they show.”
Soth has noted that following Songbook, “I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.” During a 2017 residency at FraenkelLAB, he began exploring a new, stripped down, connection-driven approach to photography, developed during silent sessions with dancers, performers, and other volunteers interested in collaboration and movement. The shift in thinking eventually led to I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, a series of portraits and interiors made in the U.S. and Europe depicting artists, writers, and choreographers, among others. “Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life,” Soth wrote about the project, which takes its name from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem. The resulting series was “notable for its quietness and lyricism,” Jordan Teicher wrote in The New York Times.
In A Pound of Pictures, Soth turned his focus to photography itself, investigating the physicality of the medium and its limited ability to preserve what is fleeting. During a series of road trips across the U.S. inspired in part by Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, Soth recorded subjects and locations with subtle connections, including flowers and butterflies, places designated for taking pictures, and piles of old snapshots. The series was published as a monograph in 2022, followed by an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery. Writing in The New Yorker, Vince Aletti noted that since the series “is about making and collecting photographs, it’s more self-conscious than most of Soth’s previous projects, but he’s always been present in his work,” and Soth’s “driving ambition [is] always tempered by genuine curiosity and empathy.”
For his most recent project, Advice for Young Artists, on view at Fraenkel Gallery in 2025, Soth visited undergraduate art programs around the U.S. Rather than offering the guidance promised by the title, the images most often find Soth at play, reclaiming the freedom and experimentation that belongs to beginners in any pursuit. Inspired in part by Walker Evans’s Polaroids of young people, the photographs range from bright still lifes made from art department props to enigmatic images of students and oblique self-portraits. Writing in Collector Daily, Loring Knoblauch notes that in the series, which was published as monograph, Soth is “actively participating with a kind of exuberantly casual playfulness, stepping back from an earnest arm’s length vantage point and embracing the art school mentality of constant personal risk taking and experimentation.”
Alec Soth was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is currently based. In addition to Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl, 2004), Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019), A Pound of Pictures (2022), and most recently, Advice for Young Artists (2024). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth started Little Brown Mushroom, an independent publishing company devoted to small-run artist books. In 2021, as part of a collaboration with jazz drummer Dave King, Soth began appearing as The Palms, in performances that combine music and photographs. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center produced a large survey of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. In 2024, Alec Soth: A Room of Rooms opened at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Most recently, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska presented Alec Soth: Reading Room, focused on Soth’s bookmaking practice. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Soth is a member of Magnum Photos.
