Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by MACK Books (here). Embossed linen hardcover with tipped-in print, 26.6 x 27.3 cm, 72 pages, with 54 color reproductions. Includes an interview with the artist, conducted by the artist. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: One of the repeated truths of art writing is the central idea of an artist needing to find his or her own original voice. And I’ll be the first to admit that I use this “artist’s voice” conceptual framework myself from time to time, especially when thinking about emerging artists who are still figuring out how to express themselves clearly and how to let go of the lingering influences of the other artists they admire. We are always looking for that singular artistic voice that is communicating in an authentically fresh way, and so we encourage artists of all kinds to take the very real risk of betting on themselves.

This idea of the artist’s voice was rumbling around in my head while I was flipping through Alec Soth’s recent photobook Advice for Young Artists, to the point that I started to reformulate my own definition of what a photobook might actually be. Of course, most would agree that a photobook is an edited selection of photographs brought together in book form, but maybe that construct is altogether too bland and therefore useless; perhaps more abstractly, what a photobook actually is is a photographic explanation of how an artist’s mind works, delivered in the precisely controlled presentation of a book. In this way, a photobook is the embodiment of that personal “voice” I was referring to above, a state of mind, in a sense, given visual (and physical) presence, almost like talking to yourself.

While many artists actively cultivate a persona of distant and mysterious reserve, throughout his now multi-decade career, Soth has been surprisingly willing to reveal what he’s thinking. In everything from blog posts to poetry selections, artist’s talks to YouTube videos, he’s opened himself up to his audience again and again with a degree of honesty and vulnerability that sets him apart. Often with an endearing sense of shy humility, he seems to just want to share what he’s seeing, how he’s responding, and what he’s therefore thinking, encouraging us to tag along on the twisting road of his own artistic journey. This has made Alec Soth, the photographic persona, almost inextricable from Soth’s actual photography.

As I thought about this more, it might actually be the case that every single one of Soth’s book projects over the years has been a snapshot of how he was thinking at that particular time. A Pound of Pictures (gallery review from 2022 here) certainly fits that definition, as do I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (gallery review from 2019 here), Songbook (gallery review from 2015 here), and Broken Manual (gallery review from 2012 here), and perhaps even earlier bodies of work fit too if we meticulously trace back even further. Over the years, his mindset has continued to evolve and change (of course), but his artistic accessibility has been remarkably consistent; and perhaps it is this warm-hearted willingness to repeatedly open himself up that has actually been one of the keys to his success.

Soth is now in his mid-fifties, and for the past handful of years, his projects have centered on the process of continuing to keep his life as an artist fresh; not so much re-inventing himself each time exactly, but pushing himself to find new ways to do what he’s doing or new ideas to chase and explore. Advice for Young Artists traces its roots back to Soth’s investigation of the late Polaroids of Walker Evans. What Soth found intriguing amongst those pictures was not the cropped vernacular signage and letter forms that have seduced many; what he discovered were some eerie portraits of young people that Evans made while visiting universities. Soth uses an amazingly evocative word to describe these images – “vampiric” – and indeed, they are haunted, with Evans pushing up close and distorting the faces almost like he wanted to devour them. But it is this idea of gathering potential energy from the young that became the seed of Advice for Young Artists; to use a resonant phrase from the recent Bob Dylan biopic, Soth was hoping to “catch a spark” from visiting with art students.

This inversion of the teacher coming to visit to learn from the students, while ostensibly providing his own battle-hardened advice, provides a satisfying paradox that Soth digs into. Advice for Young Artists is sprinkled with facsimile Post-It notes that offer the kind of pithy tips that are ambiguous enough to be nearly meaningless to a young student, especially one looking for actionable artistic ideas. Classic encouragements like “Patience etc.”, “Accept Yourself”, “Something about less being more”, and “What Do You Want, Really?” are appropriately true but altogether esoteric and mystifying, which Soth seems to acknowledge in a scrawled note detailing “Everything I know”, which is paired with an image of a stack of tiny dollhouse books no bigger than a nailhead. The only really concrete advice he offers is to make a maquette of your exhibit or book to better visualize it (which he then does himself in the final image in the book), and not to include more pictures than your own age (which he doesn’t – there are 54 photographs in Advice for Young Artists, which match exactly his 54 years at the time of publication).

If all of this is starting to sound vaguely comedic, that’s actually right. While understated visual humor and tongue-in-cheek irony have long been part of Soth’s approach, Advice for Young Artists embraces that playfulness much more overtly than any of his previous projects. Spending time with undergraduate art students (he apparently visited 25 programs across the country) seems to have encouraged him to be looser and more relaxed than his fifty-something self might have normally felt or behaved. Soth left his bulky large format camera behind, and opted for something smaller (seemingly mostly on a tripod though) and equipped with a flash, and proceeded to attempt to think more like a young, open-minded art student. The anxious excitement of trying something new, of actually experimenting with photography, and of taking some unexpected risks thrums through these images, even though Soth is nowhere near a beginner.

Advice for Young Artists begins with a visual puzzle, almost a joke. The first image (across from the title page) features a doorway, which turns out to be entirely blocked. The only way in is via the stairs only partially visible to the right, so the picture offers an exercise in the kind of creative problem solving that is the hallmark of art schools everywhere. The practical advice seems to be when a door is closed, just take the stairs.

Many of Soth’s photographs are essentially formal observations of things left behind by students in studios, work rooms, and other spaces, the secondary echoes of the art making process rather than images of any art itself. He notices colorful tape remnants on walls and floors, stacked plinths and dragged electrical cords, lockers and shelves with a few leftover objects (including a strange golden dog), and various paint palettes, two by fours, scissors, ladders, plywood sheets, and light fixtures, which he then uses as the subject of his own formal studies. This classic “process not product” mindset also leads him to pay attention to chalkboard diagrams, messy whiteboards (filled with theoretical notes on subjectivity and consciousness), meticulous monochrome shading exercises, and several painterly color matching tests of skin tone (including one source image of a vulva). And then he goes one twist further by making his own still life photographs of cluttered arrangements of stuff set up for drawing and painting classes, making pictures of red apples, vases of flowers, clothes hangers, whitewashed bottles, draped velvet cloth, a taxidermy cat, and even an empty couch and footstool for an absent model. A couple of these setups feature mirrors, conceptually turning his gaze back on himself (at least indirectly) once again.

Part of the process of finding your own voice as an artist often includes the trying on of different personas and identities, which is why fashions and looks are so important at art school – if you’re trying to figure out who you are as an artist, one place to start is with how you present yourself to the world. Not surprisingly, this leads to choices and expressions that can seem outlandish and eccentric to outsiders, but are altogether expected for those inside the community (as an aside, this intense creativity of personal presentation makes Halloween at an art school tremendously fun.) Soth has long been a nuanced and compassionate portrait maker, and he applies this same sensitivity of vision to many of the art students he met. He engages with a Goth girl with an eyehategod t-shirt, a closed-eyed red haired young woman with deep red lipstick and a key hung around her neck, a pink haired young man with headphones and a Pokemon chain, a man in boxers and red stockings doing some knitting, an orange-haired young woman strumming a guitar behind a screen of flowers, and various students working intently, their gazes blankly drawn to their drawing pads and canvases like zombies trapped in the ecstatic artistic flow. Two of these portraits seem to obliquely refer to the tension in the artistic exchange going on between Soth and the students – one features a bearded man holding an upended stool as if to keep Soth away, while another captures what seems like a gift exchange, with an outstretched hand (maybe Soth’s?) offering a flower (or wise advice) to a young man with a camera.

What makes Advice for Young Artists unique in Soth’s oeuvre is that it brings Soth himself into the frame with far more regularity than ever before. He first appears as a figure in the background of a portrait of a girl seemingly triggering her own photograph with a bulb release. Then he’s peeking into a cluttered still life setup from the background, reflected in a dirty mirror while making a portrait of a student sitting on a stool, photobombing his own picture as a blurred foreground presence in an image of a sculptural head, and joining a posing session as the nude model himself. More indirectly, it’s from his vantage point on the stage that we see an audience at RISD, and if we want to stretch even further metaphorically, as he was venturing out on these trips, maybe he was artistically feeling like the tiny mouse in the glass box, seemingly free but actually trapped on all sides. In these various self-portraits, he’s actively participating with a kind of exuberantly casual playfulness, stepping back from an earnest arm’s length vantage point and embracing the art school mentality of constant personal risk taking and experimentation. While the picture on the book’s cover may offer the cracked visage of a middle-aged man, Soth actually does his best to fight that feeling of decline here by deliberately freeing himself to have enthusiastic fun with photography once again.

I’m guessing that there will be a decent number of Soth fans who will be a little confused by this book. Aesthetically, it trades out his usual measured and refined visual elegance and precision for something a bit more flash-lit and immediate, and the undercurrents of layered self-effacing humor found in many of the images are more personal than we are used to seeing in his work. But we need to remember that any artist’s journey isn’t fundamentally undertaken for our benefit as viewers – it’s first and foremost an urgent exercise for the artist, so if Soth needs to make photographs that intuitively re-energize and reassure him in one way or another, that’s all part of a longer arc of continuing to discover and reveal his individual voice as a human who makes art. Perhaps Advice for Young Artists can be thought of as Soth exposing a slightly different side of himself than he has before, one that with the aggregation of time is feeling a bit more introspective. I for one appreciate the varied evidence of deliberate and intentional out-of-the-box risk taking seen here, even if it doesn’t hit me with quite as much grace and grandeur as in some of his strongest pictures, as it confirms that he’s continuing to challenge himself to creatively express the way his mind works.

Collector’s POV: Alex Soth is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (here), Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis (here), and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here). Soth’s photographs have begun to appear in the secondary markets with more regularity in recent years, with recent prices ranging between roughly $2000 and $202000.

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Read more about: Alec Soth, MACK Books

One comment

  1. Pete /

    Soth’s pleasantly genial and erudite personality makes him particularly endearing in the photo world, up there with Sally Mann as someone I’d like to meet up with for a cup of tea, (admittedly they might not feel the same). As for the earlier books, I didn’t think they were pushing anything all that much but eventually upon seeing a show it was undeniable that the images and the thoughtfulness behind them were exceptional. They had the perplexing effect of having wall power while remaining intimate.

    As for his most famous picture, this is worth a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4aHkl_0Jyo&t=3s

    ‘Advice’ is, as described by LK, a departure for Soth, and, as always, there’s more to it than first seems. He shares plenty of details on his channel, when he goes through the book, spilling the beans and hinting at something personal that I can’t make out but makes you fret for him, and wish him well going forward.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUs8cNmDOI

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