Alec Soth

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Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American photographer. His photography is acclaimed for having both a cinematic and folkloric feel, both evoking and hinting at the story behind the image he is photographing.

Soth's camera is a breadbox-sized R.H. Phillips and Sons 8x10 Compact camera from the late 1980s that makes diamond-edged, almost painting-like pictures. His process of photographing is complicated and reliant both on fortuity and the artist’s control. He follows the complicated and nebulous process of using the large-format camera, a device that must be reconstructed anew on each use from a variety of parts, and that uses large and expensive negatives that slide into the back. Further, the camera’s lens is particularly sensitive to variations in light and has a shallow field of focus that causes much fussiness in the artist. Soth says he is lucky if he manages to make one or two exposures on a given day of shooting. This is, of course, very different from the photographic norm in the load-and-shoot era of 35mm and digital cameras.

He has received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

His first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004. His second book, Niagara, was published in 2006. Soth has photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek.

In 2004, Soth became a nominee of the Magnum Photos.