Ping Pong Conversations is a long, friendly conversation between Alec Soth, one of the most prominent artist of this time, and the Italian curator and critic Francesco Zanot. Analyzing his most famous photographs as well as others that have been published or are virtually unknown, Soth reflects upon his career as a photographer. Each picture gives rise to a charter of its own, an original thought or reflection. Storytelling and the use of color and black and white, staged and candid approaches, and personal and political issues are just a few of the many arguments that the American photographer discusses with Francesco Zanot, resulting in a combination of words and images that constitutes both a complex examination of Alec Soth’s work and a manual on that reading of photography itself. Soth’s images are shuffled together here to form new sequences: tracing the threads of memories, addressing cultural issues and references, and thus creating unforeseen and unforeseeable connections. — The publisher
