Trip report - Alec Soth

Exhbition Report; Alec Soth - Gathered leaves


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

Alec Soth is a photographer I was slightly familiar with as I have researched some of his work before when looking for inspiration in documentary photography. Many of his images are of the documentation of people. Some posed and some candid. A lot of my work focus' on the documentation of people also, however the work of Alec Soth is a very different approach to that of my own. It is extremely to see the ways in which different documentary photographers work and to actually realise just how vast and open the genre of documentary photography can be. 

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  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) 


With an exhibition at the end of my academic year at University, It was great to see this exhibition and see how another documentary photographer chooses to present their work in an exhibition.

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. 

As well as Soth's images being framed on the walls of this exhibition his research, work and gatherings were presenting in the centre of each room in a glass cabinet. Soth is a fan of the photo book and has made several books of his own work. Just from the one previous project I have made in which I created a mock up paper book, I can understand and relate to just how much paper research and gatherings one collects in order to create a project. From my own personal experience of making a photo book I made several paper and hand made versions first, some which i drew and wrote on and some which I made more professionally. This style and process can also be seen here in Soth's exhibition. Love letters and other pieces of information or research he found and used in order to create his projects are presented in the centre of the room. For a young aspiring photographer such as myself it was so helpful and incredibly useful to see these pieces as part of the exhibition. As often when looking at final images upon a wall, I wonder how a photographer managed to get to that point, and what work was behind the scene of creating these final master pieces.