Alec Soth: Black Line of Woods

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Through Jan. 3, 2010

Photographer Alec Soth achieved renown chronicling life along the Mississippi River, said Steve Aishman and Jason Parker in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The 2005 series “Sleeping by the Mississippi” captured America’s “third coast,” from Soth’s hometown of Minneapolis to pre-Katrina New Orleans. Now Atlanta’s High Museum has asked him to turn his eye to the South. “Inspired by Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor, Soth spent the past year traveling through Southern backwoods to find structures and people on the outskirts of society.” His lushly rendered prints portray monks, survivalists, and other outsiders met during his wanderings, providing “an insightful perspective on exactly what is considered part of Southern culture.”

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Soth’s methodology is simple, said Hilarie M. Sheets in The New York Times. On long road trips, he’s “drawn to loners and dreamers he spots from his car.” In Knoxville the photographer asked a man in a camouflage jacket where he’d spent the previous night. Soth photographed him “in a little pocket of brush up on a hill, with signs for a Waffle House and a Shell station visible through the leaves.” Similar encounters produced images of a “giant-like” figure walking along a weedy path and a “tall bearded monk standing amid a forest of soaring barren tree trunks.” But one memorable photo shows no human figure at all. Soth tracked down the location where “Eric Rudolph, the so-called Olympic Park bomber,” hid for years while avoiding arrest. His suggestive shot of “a desolate parking lot bordered by a dark forest” hints at shadows still haunting the South.