10 DIGITAL CAMERA^ APRIL 2020 http://www.digitalcameraworld.comPhotographic
storytelling
Enthusiast and aspiring photographers
can learn much from this disciplineHaving clear goals in mind before picking
up your camera will help overcome any
creative block, and will really help your
development as a photographer. This is
why Digital Camera always recommends
starting a new year with a particular photo
project to engage with over the following
months. Photographic storytelling is a key
aspect of an established photographer’s
practice, but enthusiasts can also learn
much from it. Alec Soth is a celebrated
practitioner of photographic storytelling,
but in the beginning he had to figure it
out through trial and error, developing
projects into more long-form pieces of
work. One of the best pieces of advice he
offers is to work on more than one thing
simultaneously: “Keep balls in the air so
you’re not over-invested in one area.”Pro
in
focus
Soth photographed a
succession of “dreamer
characters” for his first
major work, Sleeping
by the Mississippi
Alec Soth on location
at a county fair in
one of the course’s
three case studies.Keen to capture a sense of cold giving way
to warm as the reader turns the pages, Soth
photographed a succession of what he calls
“dreamer characters”, who had decided to live
their lives in different ways to other people.
At the start of the book, we meet Peter, who
had lived on a houseboat for 25 years, and
Charles, dressed in a flight suit and clutching
a toy plane in both hands. It’s arguably Soth’s
most famous photograph (pictured opposite,
top right). Further along, there’s Lenny –
photographed in his home sitting in his
underwear, with his dog for company –
who tells Soth he dreams of living to 100.During the course, Soth describes how
getting to photograph these subjects was
a random process. Driving around, he would
see something distinctive or intriguing in a
particular area, stop his car and knock on
doors. Thanks to Soth’s use of an 8x
large-format camera, the images are replete
with fine details, and this really helped when
he came to sequence the images afterwards.
Soth followed Sleeping by the Mississippi
with NIAGARA, a body of work that explores
love and long-term relationships at this
popular honeymoon destination on the US/
Canada border. Both books are still available,
after recent reprints by the publisher MACK,
unlike Broken Manual, Soth’s next major
work. Broken Manual was inspired by the
story of Eric Rudolph, who bombed the
Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and went to ground
while being pursued by the FBI. Soth says
his first two major works were based on
geography, but Broken Manual was conceived
as a guidebook to escape from society.
With colour and black-and-white images,
some grainy and some detailed, and
appearing in a disordered sequence, Soth
notes that the book lives up to its title: it’s
a manual that really doesn’t work and is a
comment on the impossibility of running
away. “Part of what Broken Manual is all
about are the ways in which this fantasy is so
impossible to realise; we need other people.”
Initially published as a run of 300 copies,
Broken Manual sold out. As there was never
a subsequent print run, it is highly prized
by collectors today.
Other key works in the wake of Broken
Manual included Songbook, which followed
a collboration with Brad Zellar, the co-founder
with Soth of Little Brown Mushroom, a
multimedia enterprise that focuses on
visual storytelling. The pair travelled