alec soth

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  New Blog

  Posted: 15-December-2009, 6:18am CET by alecsothblog

  I’m now blogging over at The Little Brown Mushroom Blog. Come say hi…
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  Friday Poem

  Posted: 14-September-2007, 8:31am CEST by Alec Soth

  Iâ??m currently in Germany working on a book. Next door to Steidâ??s press he has several apartments (aka The Halftone Hotel) for visiting artists.

  Today in my room I read an essay by C.K. Williams called ‘A Letter to a Workshop‘. Williams says that poets should grant themselves â??the right to vacillate, to wobble, to shillyshally, be indecisive in one’s labors, and still not suffer from a sense of being irresponsible, indolent, or weak.â?�

  â??Another, related, right,â?� he says, â??is to be wrong, about anything and everything, and to know that even when your line of reflection or imagining might be viewed as absurdly illogical, you should be able to go on to its however provisional conclusion.â?�

  Staying in the adjoining room is Jock Sturges (info, images). Only two weeks ago I had a lengthy discussion with a friend about my problems with Sturgesâ?? work. After a couple days sharing meals (and a bathroom) with Jock, Iâ??m not sure what to think anymore. But I paid close attention when Williams discussed another right:

  We should be able to regard our inner existence, the part anyway that’s raw material for poetry, as a laboratory, in which mental and emotional phenomena are valued according to their potential usefulness, and considered harmless unless they demand to be concretized in malignant actions. (It should probably be kept in mind that the ultimate purpose of this sort of reflection isn’t action, but self-knowledge. Actionâ??creationâ??comes later.)

  From this follows the right of the mind to be able to remark in itself and not repress, or at least not too quickly, anything that comes to it, even such ostensibly inadmissible emotions as, to mention just a few, lust, greed, envy, anger, even rancor, even genres of otherwise unutterable prejudice. We should be able to entertain anything the mind casts up as potentially useful for a poem, while at the same time forgiving ourselves for such after all private matters, and this should be a forgiveness that arrives in a short enough time so that any shame or guilt arising from such scary glimpses within will be productive rather than debilitating for the germination of poems. We have, for poetry, to have as accurate an awareness as we can of the quality of our ethical consciousness, but we also need a firm sense of the difference between sins of the heart and sins of the hand: the mind has a life of its own which cares little for the parameters culture and society propose for it, and it is often this inner awareness which is most potentially interesting as aspects of a poem.

  Should photographers be as free as poets? Or is photography itself a â??sin of the hand.â?� Iâ??m not sure. But Iâ??m pretty sure Jock would appreciate this poem:

  On the Metro
  by C. K. Williams

  On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
  sheâ??s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
  I sit, take out my own bookâ??Cioran, The Temptation to Existâ??and notice her glancing up from hers
  to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she â??affirms herself physically,â?� that is,
  becomes present in a way she hadnâ??t been before: though she hasnâ??t moved, sheâ??s allowed herself
  to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I canâ??t help but remark
  her strong figure and very tan skinâ??(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)
  She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesnâ??t pull it away;
  she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
  achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

  I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,
  but itâ??s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:
  a memoryâ??a girl Iâ??d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,
  our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
  my having to realize it wasnâ??t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.
  The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,
  and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,
  (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,
  (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again
  as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

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  Documenta, children, sexuality, Barnes & Noble

  Posted: 15-September-2007, 7:40am CEST by Alec Soth

  Yesterday I went to Documenta. Along with feeling under the weather, I am getting to be too much of a curmudgeon to walk though a half dozen museums of Scotch tape, toothpicks and wall text. But there was the occasional gem. Iâ??m always a fan of Kerry James Marshall. He took the prize for best painter:

  

  In the sculpture catagory, I liked Lukas Duwenhöggerâ??s â??Celestial Teapot:â??

  

  And in photography I was happy to discover the vintage photograms of Bela Kolárová:

  
  more by Kolárová here and here

  But the most thrilling experience was watching â??Who is Listening 1,â?? a video by the Taiwanese artist Tseng Yu-Chin.

  

  This video powerfully addressed an issue that has been on my mind. As mentioned yesterday, I recently spent time with the photographer Jock Sturges. Jock is famous for photographing naked children. In 1990, the FBI raided Jockâ??s studio. After a year, Sturges successfully defended himself on child pornography charges.

  Jock and I had a long talk about his work and the way it is received. He convinced me of his good intentions. But I still struggle with how his work functions in the world. For years it seemed like the only photo books the local bookstores carried were crisp new books by Anne Geddes and pawed-over books by Jock Sturges. Why are these books so popular and who is the intended audience?

  Sturges agrees that it is problematic. â??That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion,â?� Sturges said in an interview.

  The thing that is so fantastic about Tseng Yu-Chinâ??s video is that it powerfully challenges our ideas of age and sexuality. In the video, the camera is focused on the sweet face of a young boy or girl. Music is playing and a gentle wind blows the childâ??s hair. All of the sudden, a stream of yogurt is shot on the childâ??s face and he/she reacts with surprise and pleasure. The same act is then repeated with numerous children.

  When I first started watching the video, I was totally entertained (a real relief from Documenta). The children are cute and their reaction is hysterical. In the audience I saw young children barely containing themselves as they waited for the next yogurt blast. I also saw an elderly woman in a wheelchair with an ear to ear grin. But the more I watched, the more I became uncomfortable. â??Does this suggest what I think it suggests?â?� I looked around at the audience. Others looked uncomfortable too.

  Along with being a stunning piece of work, the video functions as a kind of Rorschach test. Will you view this like an innocent child or like a suspicious adult?

  Poking around online for more information, I came across a text by Yu-Chin that he uses as a statement for the work:

  I liked walking in large strides when I was young, freely moving my hands, feeling the air piercing through the gaps between my fingers. It’s comfortable.

  But it was ruined by a woman. A stranger. A nameless woman. That one afternoon, when I still walked with my hands moving freely, I cheerfully crossed the street with my mother I lifted my head, without realizing that a woman was coming towards us from the other side. My hand coincidentally collided with her private part. Of course, it was through the cover of fabrics. Honestly, I had yet to realize the significance of sex. I was going to simply apologize. However, I was treated as someone blinded by sexual desire. The woman stared at me with resentment. Full of moral judgment and anger, her lips were pressed so tightly as if she is grinding her teeth behind them. As if I had been slapped mercilessly, my ears rung with endless chatter, and my head filled with cold murmurs, as if the world had frozen over to look at me and my embarrassment, pointing at me with accusation, buzzing over my behavior. And my motherâ??s figure trembled far ahead. I ran over to hold her hand. Her hand was warm, yet cold at the same time. I didnâ??t know what to feel. My mother was a woman, too.

  I did not know what the stranger was thinking, nor did I know what burden she had placed upon me. At that moment, I felt only the gliding air between my fingers, and not the part of her body that she was taught to believe to be a controversy. I remembered the air becoming suffocating, and those eyes that pierced the stifling space. The zipper on those jeans feels cold, and warm, at the same time. It takes a variety of manners to remind you, that your body had once remained in the naiveté.

  It might be that Yu-Chin and Jock Sturges have very similar motives. But context matters. Documenta isnâ??t the same as Barnes and Noble. Or is it?

  • Watch a clip of Who is Listening 1 here
  • Watch other clips by Yu-Chin here and here
  • Read articles on Tseng Yu-Chin here and here
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  Teenage Lust

  Posted: 17-September-2007, 11:33am CEST by Alec Soth

  This weekend I went to the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin to see a show that included the work of Larry Clark. After recent discussions on this blog (here and here) it was interesting to see Clark?s pictures from Teenage Lust. He shows a girl who is tripping on acid being raped, male hustlers, a [...]
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  Dog Days Done!

  Posted: 18-September-2007, 12:25am CEST by Alec Soth

  Pre-order at Photo-eye, Amazon, and Steidlville
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  Image Makers / Image Takers

  Posted: 19-September-2007, 1:34pm CEST by Alec Soth

  When I assemble reading lists for photo classes, I prefer to use texts by other photographers. My all-time must-read essay for students is Robert Adams? ?Making Art New? from Beauty in Photography. I?m also crazy about David Hurn and Bill Jay?s conversation, ?Selecting A Subject? from On Being a Photographer (free PDF here). There is [...]
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  Friday Poem

  Posted: 21-September-2007, 8:43am CEST by Alec Soth

  The Flooded Grave 1998?2000 by Jeff Wall. See details here In an interview with ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com, Graham Foust is asked to name his poetic influences. I love his answer: More often than not, these lists get boring rather quickly, perhaps more for the maker than for the reader. I don?t know. Am I moved by someone [...]
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  Hallmark

  Posted: 22-September-2007, 10:49pm CEST by Alec Soth

  Yesterday I got home from a ritzy junket business trip to LA. My plane was late so my wife and I didn?t have much time to celebrate our 11th anniversary. Back at the house, Rachel gave me a card. ?You’re more than just a funny, smart and lovable guy,? it said, ?you’re mine.? Inside she [...]
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  This post is not about sex machines

  Posted: 23-September-2007, 7:57pm CEST by Alec Soth

  Not every photographer finds his or her subject through moody introspection. One of the goals of my recent SFAI class (‘Finding Your Subject’) was to show students the possibilities of assignment photography. While I would never say it is right for everyone, editorial work can be useful in exposing photographers to new subjects. I often [...]
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  Doppelgängers

  Posted: 25-September-2007, 5:55am CEST by Alec Soth

  Last June I went to a party in New York. Alex Majoli was there and he said to me, ?there is a guy here who looks exactly like you.? I forget his name, but this Cuban fellow really did feel like my Doppelgänger. I remember that when I looked at him, I couldn?t help but [...]