Alec Soth

Comprising portraits, landscapes, and intimate interiors, SLEEPING BY THE MISSISSIPPI is a series of powerful large-scale photographic works by US artist Alec Soth. Using the Mississippi River as his guide, Soth spent five years photographing the individual lives and communities along the way from his home-town in Minnesota to the furthest reaches of Louisiana. Following in the tradition of such documentarians as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Steven Shore, Soth customizes and updates the genre for the 21st century with his own unique contribution. The resulting images of people, gas stations, churches, and various abodes resonate with profound intensity that tugs at the viewer’s emotional and intellectual core.

PORTRAITURE AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH AND LISE SARFATI

The urge to take photographic portraits of friends, lovers, and even complete strangers has remained a constant impulse for the past 150 years. Beginning with the daguerreotype and transforming into the current digital image, our contemporary age has not forgotten Daguerre. The ease and economy of photography has served to democratize image-making, providing an alternative to the costly and largely class-specific services of the portrait painter. The enigmatic and powerful large-scale photographs that comprise Sleeping by the Mississippi by Midwestern photographer Alec Soth, and The American Series, a slide loop presentation of sumptuous color works by French/Algerian photographer Lise Sarfati, make significant contributions to the rich tradition of portraiture.

Most people associate making a portrait with preserving that person against time and age. Much like Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, the photographic portrait appears to reverse the process of aging. However, a study of family albums illustrates all too clearly the essence of mortality captured in traditional portrait painting and photography. The portraitist creates an image that acts as a memorial, and each individual image becomes a vanitas. The link between death and photography has been examined at length-the early mistaken belief that photography had the power to steal the soul, or the memento mori, death pictures that were once as common as graduation photos are today. Part of the fascination with photographic portraits is that they presume a psychological intimacy with the sitter. The exterior image acts as a privileged window into the interior landscape of the subject. Both Alec Soth and Lise Sarfati succeed in providing such exclusive views gathered from their journeys across the United States: Soth from North to South using the Mississippi as his guide, and Sarfati who takes the coastal perimeter route from North Caroline to Oregon.

"I taught the weeping willow how to cry, I taught the clouds how to cover a clear blue sky, and the tears that I cried for that woman are going to flood you Big River, and I'm gonna sit here till I die...." Johnny Cash, Big River

The immense stretch of water traversing the United States from Minnesota to Louisiana has dominated the American mind as both a landscape and personality: It has been variously called 'Big River,' 'El Grande,' 'Old Man River,' and the 'Muddy Mississippi.' Bordering eight states, the Mississippi River traces vast climatic differences and broad socioeconomic and cultural shifts as it winds its way through diverse communities before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. As the subject and muse of many a novel or song, the river for Soth acts as the connective tissue between the disparate lives and identities of the people that he photographs, where each portrait of person or place forms a new chapter in Soth's visual odyssey. Much like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Soth's subjects contribute a wide range of experiences that reflect upon the complexities of human behavior.

Soth's work shares a melancholy with the work of Edward Hopper. This affinity is especially clear in his image of an isolated gas station entitled Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin (2002). Its unnatural neon glow contrasts sharply with the tombstones that pepper the tree-covered hill behind and is more reminiscent of a haunted bus shelter than active gas station. In several photographs, beds appear but bizarrely out of context-a makeshift hospital bed covered with a crumpled sheet in Green Island, Iowa (2002); a stained mattress submerged in a swamp in Helena, Arkansas (2002); or an abandoned metal bed frame over-grown with weeds in Venice Louisiana (2002). This emphasis on vacant objects of repose furthers the theme of loss by suggesting the memory of a life once lived.

Peter's Houseboat, Winona, Minnesota (2002), launches Soth's travelogue from his own snowy home state. Devoid of Peter himself but adorned by animal skulls, the houseboat floats on a white plane of snow. The makeshift houseboat rests on a wooden platform, but there is no water in sight, its closed door and dark windows suggesting an unconventional and willful private existence. Charles, Vasa, Minnesota (2002), follows this eccentric thread with a portrait of a man dressed in green overalls and wooly ski-mask holding a model airplane firmly in each gloved hand. Charles meets the viewer's gaze directly, and this obsessive hobbyist clearly stands outside the niceties of convention.

In another series of photos, the sense of loss is accompanied by aspirations of salvation. Joshua, Angola State Prison, Louisiana, presents a pleasant young man with a teardrop tattooed below his left eye. Written in blue on the neck of his white tee shirt are the words 'Preacher Man,' framing his neck like a fallen halo. Soth's notes on this work inform us that Joshua is serving a 42 year stretch for murder. Adelyn, Ash Wednesday, New Orleans, Louisiana (2002), shows a young woman with her face framed by unruly locks of dyed red hair and a cross crudely drawn on her forehead. Her demeanor, devout but uncertain, is emphasized by the vertical bars of a gate looming ominously behind. Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2002), is dressed in an ill-fitting beige suit holding a palm frond in one hand and a bible in the other. An inappropriately garish tie completes the bizarre ensemble.

Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Steven Shore are just a few of the visionary photographers that have used travel as a vehicle for recording the shifting social, economic, and cultural climate of America. Lise Sarfati and Alec Soth continue the tradition by staking claims to other psycho-geographic territories. Lise Sarfati's sojourn begins in North Carolina and continues south to Georgia then west through Texas and California before reaching Oregon. Unlike Soth's subjects who have little material wealth and wear their eccentricities on their sleeves, the 'disaffected youth' in Sarfati's portraits appear to have been born with silver spoons lodged firmly in their mouths.

No matter one's social standing, the cruel complexities of adolescence cannot be avoided. Riddled with uncertainty, insecurity, and instability, it is a time of endlessly shifting identities-physical, sexual, and psychological-and impossible to calculate or control. The urge to capture such a fleeting and ambivalent moment on film is not surprising and has been the subject of many seminal bodies of work-the extraordinary portraits of awkward youths on beaches by Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra and Larry Clark's raw and unexpurgated images of teenage sex and drug use are just two cases in point. Sarfati's contribution to the theme occupies another territory, that of ex-urban malaise.

In search of young adults exuding this intense aura, Lise Sarfati trawled shopping malls, schools, and the street to find willing accomplices. Once found, Sarfati would spend hours, even days, getting to know her subjects before taking the photo. The majority of the 80 images that comprise American Series depict portraits of young women in their own homes where they are free to explore their own tumescent identities. In Sloan # 34, Oakland, California, 2003 (2003), the subject poses with a dark blond wig and cigarette. The wig-perhaps her mother's-ages Sloan, who takes on the role of a bored middle-aged housewife that has hit the gin and Valium before noon. Remarkably malleable, Sloan appears in a number of different guises. In Sloan # 30, Oakland, California, 2003 (2003), she is pictured wearing a long red wig, large dark glasses and bright red dress that has drained the blood from her face and arms, transforming her into the child star of a horror flick. In Sasha and Sloan Oakland, California, 2003 (2003), Sloan resembles a teenager more convincingly than in any other image-photographed sucking on a cigarette fed to her by fellow temptress Sasha.

Although formally and conceptually distinct, the mutability and shifting of identities present in Sarfati's portraits immediately recall Cindy Sherman's hugely influential Untitled Film Stills series where the artist performs clichéd representations of femininity suggested by B-Movies of the 50s and 60s. Although Sarfati's work is less of an obvious critique on how gender is performed, her subjects reveal surprising fluidity. Further cinematic references can be found in Sarfati's method of presentation. All 80 images are displayed large-scale continuously using a slide projector, delivering a constant stream of seductive color images. "Candie McKensie," a soundtrack by British electronica duo Death in Vegas, completes the movie experience, providing an appropriately soft-core instrumental soundscape. The posturing masquerade, heightened color, and suburban locale lend an undeniably surreal quality to Sarfati's work. In Rose # 56, 25.05.2005, Austin, Texas (2005), a young woman in a convenience store wears make-up so excessive it reads like a Kabuki mask. The scene is evocative of a still from a David Lynch film revealing the bizarre and chilling underside of small town America.

In the digital age, it is especially fascinating to see artists using anachronistic methods of production and display. For Sleeping By The Mississippi, Soth used a large format 8 x 10 camera requiring much patience from the subject and photographer thus allowing space for genuine exchange. The 35 mm slide carousel used by Sarfati is awkward and graceless and suggestive of a 16 mm film projector-both devices so loud and clunky the viewer is clearly aware of the mechanics of presentation. Conjuring images of informal gatherings for viewing home movies and slide shows the result is both intimate and public. The photographs in Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi and Sarfati's American Series are designed to be viewed sequentially, as episodes in a open-ended drama where each character represents material for a new subplot following its own surprising path.

Ciara Ennis Curator of Exhibitions UCR/California Museum of Photography

Pressetext

Alec Soth
Sleeping By The Mississippi
Kurator: Ciara Ennis