Unlike, say, Stan Douglas’s luxuriously retro shows, where noirish monochrome is designed to send us back to the 1940s, Soth’s pictures lack conviction in their tonal emphases. The decision to go black-and-white is curious as well. In the portraits of isolated figures-a dancer, a cheerleader, a pair of studly teenage football players, a boy in a hoodie at night on the street-the larger dimensions of the print only highlight the weakness in his frame-a sense that Soth has left too much dead space around the subject. The catalog for Songbook has a celebratory pitch and beat, like a funky polka, whereas the towering space and walls at Sean Kelly swallow up his prints, which seem unnecessarily big to begin with. Soth’s images are frequently more integrated in books than galleries and museums, and that’s certainly true here. One of his insights is that Americans who in past eras might have looked content or ordinary in photographs can appear weird or worse because glossy media celebrities now define normalcy. As in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Niagara, this series conveys his affection for America’s rebels and eccentrics, the ungainly young and the obsolete elderly. Songbook continues his investigations of loneliness, how it can be allayed in community or physical challenges and yet continue to permeate the routines of daily life. Judgments about the success and quality of his photographs seem in some quarters almost secondary. The good will he has built up with his long-term projects, however, has largely spared him from critical scrutiny. The cave-like installation of Broken Manual, with its walls of books, hand-mimeographed posters, and other extra-photographic material was effective in its mirroring of his own frustrations as an artist with those of the alienated males he was trying to be a voice for. Behind his camaraderie and sense of humor about himself, one detects a churning intelligence that wrestles with the limits and ethical dilemmas of photography. What’s more, few other photographers are as accessible and self-critical as Soth. His ability to be respected in the art world, and beloved by fans beyond it, is similar to what Dave Eggers and Ira Glass have done in the worlds of books and radio, or the equivalent to the multiple platforms of another shy, rueful, big-hearted Minnesotan, Garrison Keillor. In his museum talks, editorial assignments for prominent magazines, book and zine publishing via his imprint Little Brown Mushroom, road trips and long-term projects, as well as in his collaborations with the writer Brad Zellar, he has attracted a youth following that is almost unmatched in photography. Comments/Context: From his base in Minneapolis, Alec Soth has in the last decade become a national figure.
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