Alec Soth has gotten good. Sleeping by the Mississippi had the quality of a really good graduate school application that owed to much to Joel Sternfeld, which isn’t to say there weren’t some great pictures, just way too often the images fell flat and made me want to go through American Prospects again. This was followed by the Niagara disaster, and everyone who had argued that the sudden acclaim was unwarranted and damaging to Soth’s art were able to take joy in the inevitable flameout of a boy band that seemed to be Soth’s career. Which drove him underground, where he became known more for his blogging than his photography. Meanwhile, he seemed to take on a personal quest to try out different modes of photography, joining Magnum, doing a fashion book and a book of polaroid snapshots, all with the childlike glee of a first year MFA student.
Yet quietly, in the obscurity of the uptown Gagosian, he dropped The Last Days of W, a body of work that was varied, mature and in its way took on contemporary photography by presenting an otherwise random collection of picturess that touched on contemporary events. With images like a soldier making a PBJ, Dick Cheney on TV in the corner of dorm room, a child’s diorama of an interior with a match box tank and landscapes from Alaska, all of which pushed what traditional art photography could do to address politics without becoming reportage.
Since then, the man has been on a tear trying on various artistic hats by pumping out little art books left and right, each pushing the limits of his process, and as result moving right through Joel Sternfeld’s humanist tendencies and coming out the other side with a new body of work. Broken Manual a portrait of the dark nothingness inside the loneliest of white males, a world of pocket vaginas, knives, woods, and excessive facial hair. It is as if he is speaking for the homely men of Laurel Nakadate’s video art. Soth sets this void in whited out caves, the edges of truck stops, and in abandoned rooms that literally scream out “I love you daddy.” But even more impressive is his variety of images, color, black and white, large, small, portraits, landscapes, interiors, unfocused, focused, unspotted, would be vernacular, all of which take on photography while creating a hardnosed and compelling body of work.
Needless to say, Weinstein Gallery giving their entire booth over to the work was the standout of AIPAD, which otherwise displayed an abundance of provincial print dealers peddling vernacular celebrity pictures next to unending collections of secondary works by famous dead photographers. Making it all too easy to understand why photography is rarely given the respect of other mediums.
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