A Conversation With Alec Soth About Art and Doubt

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Hanya Yanagihara

Alec Soth, “Dan-Georg. Dusseldorf,” 2018.

I had never met Alec Soth, and yet — in the artificial way that we feel we know something of the person who has created a work of art we’ve consumed and, in my case, returned to again and again — I felt I had. I first encountered Alec’s debut project, “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” several months before it was shown in New York City, in 2004. That work, a series of 47 images of people and places taken as Alec followed the sweep of the country’s second greatest waterway, which meanders and swells from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, remains the visual equivalent of an American songbook. [More]