Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) is a photographer who makes long-term series of people and landscapes in rural and suburban communities. Many of these photographs are made on road trips through the Midwest and the South. His work is rooted in the American tradition of on-the-road photography developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. He lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. The series evolved from road trips along the Mississippi River made between 1999 and 2002. It was followed in 2006 by NIAGARA, in which he documented the falls as the site of “spectacular suicides and affordable honeymoons”. In 2007 his photographs of abandoned Texas movie theatres, with façades shot straight-on against blue skies, were shown in “L'image d'après”, a Cinémathèque Française exhibition of ten Magnum photographers. The theatre pictures drew on Wim Wenders' 1976 road movie Kings of the Road. His photographs were also included in “Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde”, a 2007 exhibition at Tate Liverpool. In 2008 he started Little Brown Mushroom, an independent publishing company devoted to small-run artist books. He is also the author of the book Broken Manual.
