There will come a reckoning when art historians will look
back at our times and pick the winners and losers. The Brian Ulrichs and Mark
Wises will fade away only to be found in retrospectives at secondary museums
and the occasional monograph. What will remain is Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge
(and maybe Walead Beshty).
You can complain all you like, but the two are ever present
and unstoppable. One only needs to look at recent MFA work to see the pervasive
influence. So you might as well get on board now or you are going to have to
spend a lot of time bitching and complaining for the next couple of years until
the next things comes along. But take comfort, remember the nineties? Ethridge
and Soth are photographers who make quality pictures out in the world, and if
you don’t like that what about photography are you holding out for? If it is a
radical departure from the history of the medium that points away from Joel
Sternfeld and the history of vernacular photography, well, Beshty is working on
that, but I am not sure the results are going to be so much more enjoyable.
So relax and settle in for the awesomeness of Alec Soth.
Because he is the Springsteen of photography. He isn’t groundbreaking. His artistic
roots are always clear in what he does, and he has executed his art at such a
high level and with such enthusiasm, it’s hard not to want signing along.
Broken Manuel is Soth’s Nebraska. It’s a somber but high
point in his artistic output. Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi work owed more
to Sternfeld than I think he’d like to admit. In the same way, Greetings From
Asbury Park feels like an odd pop version of The Byrds covering Dylan. But
since then, Soth has stumbled his way into an art that is all his own, and
impressively he has had the gumption to find his voice on a very public stage. A
prime example the underwhelming Niagara, which as a show was repetitive and
dull but as a book featured an afterward of primary materials for the book.
This seems to have opened Soth up to create a string of fantastically varied
little art books, that delve into a more personal subject matter of his family
and others’ sexual predilections. In these, he has experimented with various
photographic styles that are often quicker and less formed then his more
established work.
He seemed to be on a personal crusade to take on as many
different ways of working as he could, as an almost self-directed MFA program.
Like lots of MFA students, the result wasn’t always particularly good, but the
process for those paying attention was enjoyable. Despite the so-so quality of
Bogota Days or Fashion Magazine, those who hung in with his journey I think were
well rewarded by the under-appreciated The Last Days of W, which proved that if
a tree falls in the uptown Gagosian, it in fact does not make a sound.
But out of the free associations of images and their
tangential connection to the end of the Bush administration, which seemed to
owe a lot to Ethridge’s artistic output, came his most fully formed and
strongest body of work, Broken Manuel.
The work, in Soth’s words, stems from a desire to run away
and buy a cave to live in, the very idea of which does seem to speak to his Midwestern-ness.
The resulting work reads like the angry identity art of the white man, with pictures
of a prison shank, pocket pussy, and handmade protective headgear, all shot against
a white backdrop under even studio lighting in an exacting, even evidential
black and white. The photographs are mixed with lush, large-scale landscapes
that feature disco balls in the woods and what appears to be public art in the
desert. Which are shown alongside a photograph of a naked man with a swastika
tattoo in a patch of water in a southwestern landscape and a blurry picture of
a man with a beard plus interior photographs of rooms left to rot and fall
apart. Creating a lonely world at the heart of angry teens and desolate men
whose adult life hasn’t turned out, as they would have liked.
Now, if you no have sympathy for the pain of financially
secure white men, that’s okay and more than understandable. And I am going to
ignore the somewhat weak installation of primary materials with hollowed-out
books that the rather expense version of the book version of the show comes in.
Even with that, it is now impossible to say Soth has not made a lasting impact
on photography, which has opened the doors for people to make pictures that bask
in the stream of photo history without being self conscious and just let the
quality of their ideas and execution to carry their work, creating younger
artist who are The Hold Steady to Alec Soth’s Springsteen.
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