Feature
Freeze Frame: the arresting images of Minneapolis photographer and New York art star Alec Soth
Alec Soth stays sane by staying put
See more Alec Soth photography in our SLIDESHOW GALLERY.
Hear the artist describe his process while images roll by in our AUDIO SLIDESHOW.
For details you can't find anywhere else, read Jeff Severns Guntzel's extensive REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK.
If Beverly Hills has a Main Street, it's Rodeo Drive—three blocks of palm trees and designer boutiques with names like Armani, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton. Impossibly expensive cars—Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis—cruise down the strip. Paparazzi stalk red carpets and limousines.
From the balcony of a brand new Chanel Boutique one evening this past December, Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, an invited guest at the store's glamorous opening party, surveys this scene, clad in a black blazer and black slacks he bought with the help of an former intern—"a real fashionable dude."
Inside, in an oversized dressing room intended for the private shopping of the elite, hang three large photographs of a Paris fashion show snapped by Soth. Mingling throughout the store are Hollywood starlets (Hilary Duff, Angie Harmon) with flawless bodies wrapped tight in extravagant clothes. Standing near Soth on the balcony is the young actor Chris Klein (American Pie). It occurs to Soth that Klein's suit looks much better than his own does.
Somewhere on the street below, Soth's driver, hired by Chanel to chauffeur him the two blocks from his hotel to the opening, waits for him. Earlier, at the hotel—a Four Seasons where rooms start at $545 and the $70 breakfast, much to Soth's bewilderment, didn't come with eggs—he told the driver, "I'll just walk." The driver argued: "You should take the car." Being a man of manners from the Midwest, Soth took the ride, and a few short seconds later he stepped from the car onto Chanel's red carpet.
A photographer wants to snap his picture. Soth stretches out on a bench and strikes a mock-seductive pose, smiling playfully through a thick, black beard. He hasn't even had a drink yet and has no idea why he's doing this.
For a guy who grew up a shy kid in Chanhassen, married his high school sweetheart, Rachel (a nurse), and never left Minnesota, the opulence is absurd—but no more so than his sudden success.
"I know I would make more money if I lived in New York and went to parties and all of that," he says. "But then I would be an alcoholic."
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER, in his tiny studio above a coffee shop on the blighted corner of Franklin and First avenues, Soth waits nervously for a visitor: Martin Weinstein, the exultant, silver-haired boss of the Weinstein Gallery, an art-world outpost on 46th Street and Lyndale Avenue. Soth rented the Franklin studio space to make a statement: He is a serious artist. He's been learning how to be a photographer for nearly a decade, shooting ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings for small newspapers in the St. Paul suburbs.
The studio's location is perfect. It's close to his job at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where he photographs the holdings for use in books and brochures. But the decor is hardly high-class: some darkroom equipment, a '60s-era plush pink velvet chair from a garage sale, and a skylight. In anticipation of his distinguished guest, the 30-year-old photographer has framed and hung some of his best work—hoping, cautiously, that it might some day adorn the much swanker wall space at Weinstein's influential gallery.
That Weinstein is coming at all is a product of outrageous fortune. A high school-aged intern in Soth's department at the museum just happens to be the daughter of the notoriously proud connoisseur of modern photography. After discovering Soth, she started badgering her father to come have a look.
"What's the imagery?" Weinstein asked skeptically.
"He's got these pictures of sheep in parking lots," his daughter Molly explained.
"I do Chuck Close and Man Ray," the father told her. "I don't do livestock in parking lots."
But daughters have a way of chipping away at a father's resolve, and before long Weinstein caved and agreed to visit Soth at his studio.
To Soth's immediate relief, Weinstein walks through the door and compliments the space. The photographer is excited to show off his sheep pictures, but Weinstein focuses on a handful of photos taken on a series of road trips along the Mississippi River. He sees a photo of a houseboat on a frozen Winona riverbank—it's a bleak but vivid winter shot—as well as a portrait of a woman named Adelyn with fire-orange hair and an Ash Wednesday mark on her forehead, improvised from the remains of an expired cigarette .
Weinstein is impressed. On his way out the door, he tells Soth, "Call me when you get 10 great pictures."
So Soth went hunting for tattered and isolated spots along the Mississippi, usually in the spring and with a pile of books on tape. In the back seat of the van was his constant companion: a complex and fussy R.H. Phillips and Sons 8x10 Compact camera, a relic of the late '80s that opens like an accordion. The contraption sits on a tripod strong enough to hold a small child; the negatives cost $20 a piece and capture incredible detail and color.
From all those miles up and down the river emerged a collection of photographs called "Sleeping by the Mississippi." The work won him his first major award: the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for photography. Soon two curators from the Whitney Museum in New York City were flying in to meet Soth. "I think they took pity on me," Soth says, only half-joking. By 2004, prints from his Mississippi project were hanging at the Whitney Biennial in New York City.
"As custom dictates," New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in his review of the exhibit, there were "a few good discoveries (Alec Soth, a photographer)."
The tossed-off reference was enough to turn Soth into an overnight star. "It was just those four words, and it hasn't stopped since," says Weinstein, who now represents Soth.