The Seneca

Alec Soth

Alec Soth shoots poetic, offbeat pictures of American lives and landscapes that balance a sense of alienation and intimacy. In the tradition of on-the-road documentary photography established by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and William Eggleston, Soth captures the unexpected moments of beauty and strangeness he encounters on his travels; he’s less interested in narrative than in symbolic evocations of national history, identity, and politics. Soth first gained recognition with his series “Sleeping by the Mississippi” (first published in 2004), which features lush, painterly color prints of landscapes and portraits which he shot over five years of car trips along the Mississippi River. He has since received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Soth has exhibited widely. His work has sold for up to six figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions. A member of the Magnum Photos collective, Soth has shot editorial commissions for clients including The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, and WSJ. Magazine.