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Alec Soth

Biography

Photo by Carrie Thompson

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Soth received international acclaim when his photographs were featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials.

Soth's photographic style has continued to develop in subsequent series beginning with his iconic Sleeping by the Mississippi, and including NIAGARA, The Last Days of W and Broken Manual. Soth uses his large format camera to photograph the people and landscapes of suburban and rural communities, often during road trips throughout the Midwest and the South.

Soth’s photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, Soth’s Gathered Leaves, an exhibition bringing together his four signature series – Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, and Songbook, traveled to a number of institutions, including The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki. In 2008, a large survey exhibition of Soth's work was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center mounted a comprehensive exhibition with an accompanying catalogue entitled From Here To There, Alec Soth’s America. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim.  In 2008, Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015) and Gathered Leaves (2015), which brings together an essay by Aaron Schuman spread across 29 large format postcards, with mini facsimile versions of 4 of Soth’s previous books [3 of which are now out-of-print], all housed together in a luxurious printed and embossed clamshell box. 

His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, to name a few. Soth is also a member of Magnum Photos.

Soth lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For more information, please visit www.alecsoth.com.

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Biography (PDF2)

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Videos

Photographing contemporary America with Alec Soth, NOWNESS, February 17, 2020

Sean Kelly, New York, April 4, 2019

Alec Soth + Stacey Baker: This is what enduring love looks like, Mar. 2015 

 

ASX.TV: A Conversation with Alec Soth - On "Gathered Leaves" - at the Media Space, Science Museum (2015), Nov. 4, 2015

 

 

Alec Soth photographs loneliness in Silicon Valley, Nov. 7, 2013

Alec Soth: An American Photographer, Sep. 15, 2012 

Alec Soth – Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, Nov. 7, 2012

Alec Soth with Andrei Codrescu, Jul. 14, 2005

Photographer Alec Soth on a Life of Approaching Strangers, Jan. 5, 2011

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