Copyright %C2%A9 Alec Soth
Abandoned House, Coahoma, Mississippi, 2021
Alec William Sothexpand_more
Archival pigment printexpand_more
Gift of funds from Mary and Bob Merskyexpand_more 2022.13.2
Not on Viewexpand_more
In A Pound of Pictures—Soth’s pandemic series—the artist centers his unwavering love of photography and reckons with its pull upon his life. The act of picture making lies heavy along each of the compositions selected; seeing the world clearly presupposes a kind of distance and a removal of the self from the frame. These photographs, however, insist upon the physical and emotional presence of the artist: in perhaps the finest of the series, he stands behind his view camera in a hotel room, photographing his and his daughter’s reflection in a lens-like mirror. In another, Soth reprises Walker Evans’ iconic view of the steel mills and row houses of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from a hilltop graveyard, parking his own battered minivan at the center of the frame. In an abandoned house, he arranges videotapes and snapshots with artificial flowers for an elegiac still-life; in another, he shows a woman arranging her own bouquet from discarded flowers at a crossroads. Through each composition, Soth imparts a sense of homecoming, as well as a kind of fateful wonder at the vast emotional terrain of life.
Details
- Title
- Abandoned House, Coahoma, Mississippi
- Artist Life
- born 1969
- Role
- Photographer
- Accession Number
- 2022.13.2
- Curator Approved
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Copyright © Alec Soth