Alec Soth

Celebrated as one of the most important US photographers working today, Alec Soth merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. His first photographic series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, evolved from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River made between 1999 and 2002. The series captured America’s iconic yet often neglected “third coast”, and took Soth from his native Minnesota down into the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, Soth created the series out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. 

Soth followed Sleeping by the Mississippi with the 2006 series NIAGARA, in which he documented the famous falls as the site of “spectacular suicides and affordable honeymoons.” His series Broken Manual (2010) looked to those Americans who have abandoned civilisation in favour of inspiration.

Born in 1969, Soth grew up in rural Minnesota. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. He is a member of Magnum Photos and runs an independent publishing company LBM (Little Brown Mushroom). Soth has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006) Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2015). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows at Jeu de Paume, Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center, Minnesota (2010) and Media Space, London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.