If you follow pop culture’s magic rule of three, then the Mississippi River counts as a bona-fide trend this summer. There’s the promotional extravaganza called the Grand Excursion, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s ambitious exhibition, Art & Life Along The Mississippi River, 1850-1861 (which covers the time of the original 1854 Grand Excursion), plus all of their attendant hoopla. On the heels of those events is the July 9 opening of Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series of photographs at the Weinstein Gallery by Alec Soth. This exhibition might not have the grandness of the Excursion or the breadth of Art & Life, but it’s one ripple created by the splash that Soth made in the past year.
The Minneapolis photographer was one of the standout artists at the 2004 Whitney Biennial this spring; a concurrent show at Yossi Milo, Soth’s New York gallery, satisfied the demand to see (and, of course, purchase) more work from the Mississippi series. There has since been another gallery show in San Francisco, and a book will be published this September.
What is it about this body of work—forty-five images of people, landscapes, and interiors shot in and around small towns along the river—that struck such a chord with the art world? It’s not just the cognoscenti, it’s thousands of museumgoers eager to see what the Biennial branded as the latest and greatest American art; it’s art directors at major glossy magazines calling to commission a Soth photo shoot. It’s Gerhard Steidl, the legendary German publisher of art and photo books, taking on a relative unknown.
At the Biennial in particular, which displays the wares of more than a hundred artists, it’s a feat for any work to truly captivate. These ritualistic surveys, regardless of the thematic declarations of their curators, inevitably end up more like a bazaar than an art exhibit, and are just as exhausting to take in. After dozens of galleries filled with sprawling wall paintings, arid conceptual sculptures, videos demanding ten minutes (or more!) of your time, and room-sized installations of psychedelia, Soth’s “straight” photography served as a welcome and earthy respite. The stark, large-format images invited, even demanded scrutiny: a jumpsuited man standing on a roof, holding two model airplanes; the garish green walls and tapestry armchair in an Iowa brothel; a rusting bed frame nearly swallowed by foliage in a swampy backwater. At the Biennial, these were like the wallflowers at a school dance that the guys suddenly found compelling for their freshness and honesty.
Soth himself has a simple explanation for his work’s reception at that exhibition. He told me, “I think it was popular because it’s accessible.” Fair enough. But it’s possible that viewers also somehow intuited what this series meant to its creator. Finally acting on a long-standing dream, Soth set out to travel south along the Mississippi, with no objective in mind other than to satisfy his own boyish wanderlust. He was also, however, quite consciously following in the tradition of American road photography embodied by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers in the thirties, Robert Frank in the fifties, and William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Adams, and Steven Shore in the sixties and seventies.
Unlike those artists, however, Soth seeks a kinship with the bohemian figures and eccentrics that he both admires and photographs. “One of the things I love about the river is how, as you follow it from north down south, these different types of personalities emerge,” he says. He admits to being particularly drawn to personalities that reinforce the national narrative about the Big River—the slow decline of this once-glorious economic engine, so essential to the nation’s growth; the shores, small towns, and people that now embody a lost America full of picturesque oddities; a dreamy obsolescence. Certainly Soth didn’t choose to photograph the million-dollar lofts along the Mississippi in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Nor did he take in the riverboat casinos or factories or suburbs or golf courses—all of which his teacher, Joel Sternfeld, with whom he’s often compared, might have photographed had he undertaken a Mississippi River series. While Sternfeld tends to train his lens on the socio-economic landscape, Soth’s sensibility is shamelessly romantic: the artsy, weathered domicile in “Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota”; the fluorescent glow of a gas station that falls on gravestones in “Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin”; the battered furniture in “Luxora, Arkansas” gathered to create an outdoor living room for vagrants.
In the forthcoming book, images are edited so that they move from the frigid north in early spring to the blossoming of New Orleans during Lent and Easter. Throughout, beds are among the most overt of themes, with their intimate allusions to dreaming, loving, sex, illness, death, religion, and rebirth.
Particularly dreamy instances of amateur art, and the art of self-transformation, are another compelling thread: a cartoonish rendering of a headless muscleman’s body drawn on a vivid blue wall; a black-haired figure painted on a sliding glass door. A Mississippi matron poses proudly with her own “photograph of an angel” (as seen in a cloud formation), while a Louisiana prisoner has written “Preacher + Man” on his T-shirt collar. And toward the end of the book, a strapping, bewigged cross-dresser in Easter finery sits primly on a Disney princess bedspread.
These images all play with a familiar Mississippi River narrative, but they also touch on Midwestern exoticism and the Southern Gothic, and reveal the river itself as the common thread between the two. Ever since Lewis and Clark, and even before, civilized folk on the East Coast have periodically looked westward to renew their surprise and delight at what curious things are to be found in the hinterland: Convicts, preachermen, hookers, wrestlers, all-around oddballs.
Soth’s romanticism leads him constantly to strike at the tyranny of literalism that plagues photography as a point-and-shoot medium. This body of work is intricately composed, using a cumbersome 8×10 format camera—the old-fashioned type set on a tripod, which requires the photographer to throw a cloth over his head and shoulders. In this regard, Soth is not so much a photographer but a picture-maker, scrupulously manipulating colors, angles, poses, props.
This is shown to advantage in a work like “Mother and daughter, Davenport, Iowa,” with its amazing contrasts in focus—the clarity of the daughter’s fingernails and cigarette, or the mother’s toes—and the slight blur on legs, feet, fabric. You begin analyzing the poses of arms and legs, and thinking about the conversation that transpired during the long set-up of the camera and the scene it would record.
Elsewhere, Soth’s eye can become a bit too fastidious, even obsessive. In “New Orleans, Louisiana,” the position of a chair seems so intentional that you want to find the blocking marks taped on the floor. This begins to impugn the rest of the composition: Did the photographer sweep that small pile of detritus into one corner of the image in order to counterbalance the light bulb in the opposite? Similarly, there’s a whiff of heavy-handed staging in “Immaculate Conception Church, Kaskaskia, Illinois”—in the way an old armchair is situated in a brick-walled corner beneath a picture of priest, draped with a gold vestment, with a large, cheap mountain landscape leaning on its side in a doorway. Soth cheerfully admits that the aura of one image would be “ruined” if the viewer knew its “true story.” (He wouldn’t reveal the story, and I won’t reveal the image—and I’m not sure it makes a difference anyway.)
Soth is probably the last person who could have predicted his good fortune. A few years ago, he was “mister conservative,” a workaday guy tied to his job and hi
s home, where he helped his wife care for her mother, who lived with them and recently succumbed to cancer. “I was always painfully shy, even in college,” he says, noting that his classmates must be shocked to find that he ended up photographing people.
Instead of waxing poetic about his vision or his determination, Soth credits his success to good timing and good luck. He received the Minnesota trifecta of artist grants (the Jerome, the McKnight, the state arts board) in relatively quick succession, which brought him attention from Walker Art Center, which in turn led to the Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Now that he’s got a post-Biennial bandwagon (something that doesn’t happen to all hundred-plus artists in that show), he’s taking it as far as it will go. “My philosophy is to take advantage of as many opportunities as I can,” he says. “I’m a pragmatic Midwestern boy!”
There’s a savvy edge to that pragmatism, too. Sleeping by the Mississippi has deep roots in the tradition of American road photography, but Soth is leery of being branded “the Mississippi River guy,” or even the “8×10 format guy.” He notes wryly that in turning in his work for an editorial assignment, the art director was disappointed to see digital images instead of negatives shot with his 8×10 camera: “I was shooting while riding a bike,” he says, laughing. “I was shooting moving vehicles.”
He’s also chosen to ignore the advice of an art-world “goofball” who urged him to move to New York. “First, that’s cynical,” he says. “Second, I absolutely disagree that as a photographer, you have to live in New York to be successful. Where would photography be if everyone lived there? Look at what that does to other art forms.” But perhaps most important, Soth is well aware that his status as the “exotic Midwesterner” carries a certain amount of mileage with Eastern art and media figures. Why relocate there? Here is where he can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time.