Alec Soth Exhibition, Gathered Leaves, National Media Museum, Bradford

I had an enjoyable visit to the Bradford National Media Museum yesterday to see Gathered Leaves the Alec Soth Retrospective exhibition.  The exhibition covers the last ten years of Soth's work and includes four bodies of work: Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagra (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2014).

Soth describes himself as a lyrical documentary photographer, but there is a much landscape work in there as well.  However, most photography crosses genres now and the tag travel photographer could also be applied to Soth's work.

The title for the exhibition could, we are told refer to sheets of images brought together or it could refer to a line from Walt Witman's 1885 poem, Song of Myself:

Alone in the far wilds and mountains I hunt,

Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,

In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,

Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-killed game,

Falling asleep on the gathered leaves with my dog and gun by my side.

In the same way that Whitman is telling stories, perhaps fictional, about himself, and is here describing a a journey in the wilds, perhaps the title of the exhibition gives us a clue that the work is about Soth himself and the journeys through life that he has made.

Soth regards himself as an American photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfield, but perhaps we could add others here; William Eggleston, Walker Evans, maybe?

Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) documents a road trip he made along the length of the river.  The images displayed are from 1999 - 2002 so was this one extended trip or an amalgamation of several.  Beds and mattresses feature heavily in this series, hence the title.  I wondered how long he took to get to know people before he photographed them; it is difficult to imagine that some were taken on a first acquaintance.  The images ask many questions and allow for many interpretations.  Do they portray people, present or absent, dreaming of something better or aspiring to higher things as perhaps Charles Lindbergh and Johnny Cash did.  Most seem to be in straightened circumstances.  Are they a portrayal of hope or despair; dreams or broken dreams?

The work would appear to have gone through different stages of presentation from mock ups of books to the final edition and then to a series of gallery prints.  All of the prints are the same size, although a mix of vertical and horizontal format, mounted on white and in grey frames.  They are chromogenic prints on oyster or semi-gloss, lustre paper.

In Niagra Soth links the tourist image of the falls to the fact that it is a honeymoon destination associated with 'love'.  He collected love letters from people, although it is difficult to imagine that these were given to him.  They are displayed along with the book that he produced with notes on the letters and images.  We are told that he flirts with the picture-postcard cliche of Niagara, which is a subject tackled by painters of the American sublime.  The exhibition features a large print of the falls.  Other images are of people he came across at Niagara sometimes as couples and sometimes alone.  Some he persuaded to pose naked for him  Interestingly there is an image of a box of pawned wedding rings.  Again there is an element of pathos here.

Prints are again semi-gloss chomagenic framed and mounted as the previous series, but much larger.

Broken Manual (2010) arose through researching Eric Robert Rudolf the 'Olympic Park Bomber' who, while on the run hid out in the Appalachian Wilderness.  He has since been caught and is in prison in Florida.  While engaged in his research Soth discovered that many other recluses had retreated from the world and were living wild.  Interestingly he found out about them on the internet.  They comprised survivalists, hermits and monks.  In this body of work he explores the desire to run away and, in fact, dons the persona of one of these people: Lester B. Morrison.  As Morrison he wrote his own survival manual, How to Disappear in Amerika, which he produced as a maquette and which eventually became the book Broken Manual.  In this series the prints are again large and printed on semi-gloss paper, but this time are digital prints.  The frames are grey and 3D mounted against a white background. Small figures of the subjects are often dwarfed by their surroundings.  I actually liked this from a lamdscape point of view; the figures gave scale to the image and made the land as important as the subject.  Sometimes there were no figures in the image and the presence of a person was implied by their homes or belongings.  Two were of basic homes built into cliffs or caves and in one case there was a satellite dish.  This with an internet presence makes one ask the question how much do they want to disappear.  The exhibit also had a display of Soth's books along with survival leaflets.

In Songbook (2012-2014) we find Alec Soth's most recent work.  After adopting the persona of a recluse he felt that he wanted to reconnect with the world.  Along with writer Brad Zellar he returned to his earlier role as a news photographer (albeit fictional) and torued the country with Zellar looking for 'stories'.  These were produced as unbound publications, each covering a different state.  Later the photographs, without Zillar's text, became the book Songbook.  This time the photographs are all black and white as were some of the images in Broken Manual.  It is as if in Broken Manual  he was experimenting with monochrome and now decided to move completely to that style.  Again digital archive brints on semi-gloss paper, they are printed extremely large and box mounted in black frames.  It is the large size of the images that one notices as much as anything else.

Of Songbook we are told that it is a chronicle of 21st century America, exploring the human condition in the digital age.  In fact all of the work in the exhibition is 21st century, but I felt that it had a 1950 -1970s small town America feel about it, although I never been there.  Certainly most of the images could not have been 21st century England.  I felt that each body of work looked at people in 'straightened' circumstances; he likes to photograph vulnerability. David James in the BJP (James, 2015) suggests that we are witnessing the 'less-travelled America' and that Soth has photographed in what are known condescendingly as the 'flyover states'.

 I have already researched Alec Soth while working on my assignment 2 and that blog can be found at this link.

James, D. (2015) Photography is a Language: Alec Soth on his first UK Exhibition, BJP, [0nline] Available from: http://www.bjp-online.com/2015/10/photography-is-a-language-alec-soth-on-his-first-uk-exhibition-gathered-leaves/  [Accessed 05.05.16]

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 British Journal of Photography, [online] Available from: http://www.bjp-online.com/2015/10/photography-is-a-language-alec-soth-on-his-first-uk-exhibition-gathered-leaves/ [accessed 05.05.16]