From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Through Jan. 2, 2011

For the past two decades, Alec Soth has traveled America restlessly, photographing its outcasts and eccentrics. “These are Alec Soth’s people—the ragtag individualists, outsiders, scofflaws, and loners who linger in the mildewed shadows of small-town dives and backwater shacks,” said Mary Abbe in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Walker Art Center’s retrospective of the photographer’s work traces his art from his earliest photographs at Minnesota’s State Fair to his creepy recent portraits of New Orleans’ Goth subculture. But his most famous series remains “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” whose huge color portraits capture such figures as Charles, “a flight-suited recluse” standing on a roof holding two model airplanes. When the series appeared at the Whitney Biennial, three years after 9/11, it resonated deeply “as a portrait of a free-spirited but desolate heartland.”

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It would be easy to look at such images and simply get depressed, said Gregory J. Scott in the Minneapolis Downtown Journal. But Soth’s photographs manage to be something more—“grotesque in a literary sense and deeply, darkly humorous.” An image of an ice-fishing camp, plastered with pages from nudie magazines, looks like something out of a film by the Coen brothers. Even in his recent images of hermits, mountain men, and survivalists, Soth “always leaves room for a wry smile.” In one, he shows us a bedroom that a man has built inside a cave, but he draws the viewer’s eye to the makeshift closet—“a single bar wedged into a craggy nook,” where a pink plaster hanger dangles. “The girlish, homey touch is so wonderfully unexpected, I actually heard a gallerygoer let out a pleased little yelp when she saw it.”