Alec Soth Exhbition

Exhbition Report; Alec Soth - Gathered leaves


Recently, I visited Alec Soth's Exhibition, Gathered leaves, in London's Science Museum.

Alec Soth is a documentary photographer from America. I have briefly touched upon some of Soth's work previously as with documentary photography always being my main interest, Alec Soth is a photographer I have come across during research into other influential documentary photographers. 

With having touched upon Soths work before in my research, and finding his work very influential and interesting to look at, I was looking forward to embarking on the trip to London to see his work actually in his own exhibition. 

The exhibition 'Gathered Leaves' presents work from several different projects spanning across Soth's fairly short but very successful career so far. The work chosen intact, spans across ten years of his career.

The work included was from the projects; 

 Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004)
 Niagara (2006)
 Broken Manual (2010)
 Songbook (2014) 


Despite my excitement to take in the prints themselves when view them, I wanted to also take note on how the exhibition was laid out, for example, looking at print sizes, spacing between each prints, and how they were laid out. Each project had its own room which lead into the other, rather than it all being spread round just one room. 

The images varied in size depending on the different exhibitions, which was obviously understandable, as although the projects were brought together as a collective, they were images from different projects, therefore having different meanings, although all still from a documentary style, some images evidently worked better larger than others. 

The first room, "Sleeping by the Mississippi" started with small images, no larger than 12x16 frame. What struck me most about this project was the flow of colours throughout the images and section of the exhibition. The colours tended to be quite cold, with a lot of blues and greys. 

What I find great about Soth's work is the fact he shows the fact that documentary photography really does not have an boundaries. With a lot of documentary photographers you will find they focus upon just portraits, or just object or just landscapes where as Soth includes all of these different genres within documentary photography, in order to tell his story or put across his message affectively. When i personally even think of documentary images of people, i think of them as candid shots, catching people going about their ordinary life, unaware of the presence of the camera. However Soth really does show that that doesn't have to be the case. These posed shots of people sat on their beds or couches, posing for the camera are still a documentation of those people and their surroundings. 

The gentleman who showed myself and my group around the exhibition explained that the "sleeping by the Mississippi" project followed a theme of dreams. What I then found interesting was the clever way Soth had included beds in some of the images throughout the sequence. Again this is something iIfound rather clever and showed a way of working in a documentary style I would not normally have thought of myself. 

In the following room to this was the project 'Niagra', the prints here were much larger, and the concept of variations between landscapes and portraits was even more evident. The portraits in this project were much more considered and posed portraits unlike the ones in the previous project where I felt they were more relaxed, for example, a lady laid on her bed as appose to this project where one of the most striking images was a close up head and shoulders shot of a lady, in which you could see a lot of consideration had gone into creating this portrait. 

In my minor project at University just prior to this visits I was asked to produce prints and a machete book, in which I placed all my chosen images from the project in sequence almost to tell a story. This idea of making books of final projects was something which was new to myself. Alec Soth also works in this style of producing these narrative photo books as an end result to a project. I think this concept and idea is a great way of presenting work and tying the work together and emphasising the narrative behind the images. I aim to carry on working in this way with projects i produce in the future. In each of the rooms within Soth's exhibition, a glass cabinet was in the middle of the room, presenting his own photo books, but also along side the finished piece was machete or 'mock up' books he had made in the process leading up to the final outcome. He also presented his research and some written findings for each project, which was brilliant to see as it showed the amount of research or the way in which he was lead to produce these final outcomes. I found being able to see how a photographer or artist works in terms of research and the journey of their projects is incredibly interesting and useful.