Marion Glass: Senior Portfolio: Lecture: Alec Soth (rhymes with "both")

Last night I was lucky enough to attend Alec Soth's lecture. I waited until this morning to post about him because I felt I needed the time to collect my thoughts and form an opinion. I thought he was an extremely entertaining speaker, quirky, and had a very dry sense of humor that shows through his work.

I was drawn to the fact that he did not seem pretentious at all; he began the lecture by speaking about his crises of feeling lost and unimportant as a photographer, and even poking fun at his early work. I am not sure about everyone else, but that is something I can relate to.

To counteract his feelings of unimportance, Soth began to seek stories that he could tell through his work. I thought that his series Niagara was the most successful on that level, and the easiest for me to make a connection with. Soth said that he was "moving through time and connecting the dots" by drifting around and photographing strangers to tell their stories. Niagara is a story about love (but not in the cliche sense - though there are many cliches captured in the images) and Soth's general mistrust of new passion. He said the series was constantly "spiraling downward" to a darker level. Niagara was published as a book, which includes stories, letters, and connections between images and people in the back. Below are some of my favorite images from the series. You can see all of Niagara and more of Soth's work at his website, and learn about his self-published works here.