Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi - 2004

Mississippi Dreaming

by Colin Pantall


Alec Soth has had a fantastic year. In March, the thirty-five-year-old photographer’s pictures of life on the Mississippi were the hit of the Whitney Biennial in New York. In June his book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published to widespread acclaim, while in the same month he joined Magnum Photos as a nominee.

Sleeping by the Mississippi has been ranked with great representations of his country such as Walker Evans pictures of depression-era America, Robert Frank’s harsh vision of America in the 1950s and, more recently, the colour work of Soth’s former teacher, Joel Sternfeld.

Shot over a period of 5 years, Sleeping by the Mississippi is a trip along America’s ‘Forgotten Coast’, the neglected banks of the country’s longest river. In 46 immaculately composed colour images, Soth travels from the frozen northern reaches of the river to the fecund squalor of the Mississippi Delta.

Along the way, Soth shows landscapes, interiors and portraits, most of which have a dreamlike and drained feel to them. He alludes to religion, race, crime, sex and death, showing the lost hope, loneliness and unrealised dreams of the people he meets.

“I live near the beginning of the Mississippi and I have always felt a pull to it,” says Soth. “I used to run away when I was 5 or 6 - I’d pack a suitcase with books and run away from home - I’d only get a few blocks but it was the whole Huck Finn process,” where, “...the north is home and the south symbolises the exotic.”

“In the beginning the project had nothing to do with the Mississippi. It evolved from a project called From Here to there in which one picture leads to another, connected by an idea or a theme. In the process, I travelled down the Mississippi, but I got to thinking that the idea was too gimmicky, so I shifted to the idea of the Mississippi being a link between the pictures.”

But Sleeping by the Mississippi is not really about the river, but about the spirit of wandering and about the dreams people have. Throughout the project, Soth asked his subjects to write down their dreams. The first image in the book is of Peter’s houseboat in Winona, Minnesota. These are the northern reaches of the river, where the exotic has not yet taken hold. It’s winter and the banks are covered in snow. The houseboat is a ramshackle affair, adorned with bones from old hunting trips. A string of washing hangs from a clothes line - children’s clothes and, incongruously, a tie. “I dream of running water”, writes Peter.

For others, dreams mean ambition, fantasy and faith. Throughout the book, religion forces itself into the project. Sheila from Leech Lake Indian Reservation stands with her arms outstretched. Behind her is a bible and a picture of Christ on the cross. She wears a sweatshirt covered with hand-written biblical quotes, all written in a remarkably similar hand, key words heavily underlined.

Sheila only agreed to be photographed if Soth accompanied the picture with the following text. “If you don’t have Jesus in your life, you are truly missing out on a blessing. He will set you free. Accept him today.”

If Sheila preaches the love of Christ, Bonnie finds consolation in the tortures of hell. It’s a place, she tells Soth, where “...the fearful, and unbelieving and abominable..” amongst others, “...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone...” (Revelations 21:8).

Soth photographs Bonnie on her sofa. Her face has an edge to it beneath the beehive hairdo and in her hands she holds a gilt-framed photograph of a cloud in the shape of an angel.

Other religious images include Jesus-clad interiors, street preachers, convicts at a crucifix, Frankie (the sad-looking sister of TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart) and a Memphis apartment decorated with two scratched and torn photographs of Martin Luther King - a picture of the betrayal of America’s greatest dream.

The driving force behind such images, says Soth, is curiosity. This is especially true of his commercially tinted images of sex where Soth was forced to overcome his natural shyness. “The first picture relating directly to sex was of Sunshine, who was a prostitute working in this motel - which so obviously was being used for sex. I was terrified to go into this motel, but I was so curious that I had to go and have a look.”

Soth shows a scantily-clad Sunshine lying on a motel bed in Memphis. Her real name is Monique. She is twenty-one years old and writes Soth, “...she had run away from home at fourteen after the birth of her son, whom she had left with her parents. She has been Sunshine ever since.”

In a brothel in Davenport, Iowa, Soth shoots a mother and daughter together. They stare at the camera, legs crossed, both wearing silk negligees. The daughter dreams of becoming a nurse, but the mother gave up dreaming a long time ago. Despite the hardness of the picture, Soth believes there is a lightness about the place - a sentiment quite at odds with traditional portrayals of prostitution.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Soth’s work is his openness to people and ideas. He portrays people who are often at the fringes of society, people who could be considered freaks or oddballs. But Soth captures the ordinariness of people, thanks to the dynamics of the large-format camera he carried.

“The technology of the large-format camera changes the whole relationship between the photographer and subject. I normally don’t have a camera with me when I approach somebody , so immediately it’s less threatening. Then people ask me about the project and then they see the camera. It’s big and old-fashioned and my head being covered by a dark cloth changes things. They can’t see my face and so it becomes more relaxed. Because it takes so long, you have a conversation with them and the result shows.”

“Sometimes I ask if I can go into people’s homes and take their pictures there. Some of the interiors in the book started with pictures of people, but then I found their homes were more interesting so I shot that instead. Obviously you can’t just ask people to go into their homes and take their pictures.”

Once inside, Soth rearranged interiors in his quest for the perfect composition. It’s an approach that makes his images sometimes too perfect and too contrived, giving his photographs the feel of installations at times.

It’s a criticism Soth recognises. “I think the weak point of the book is the lack of in-between pictures. It’s too bam-bam-bam, too many iconic images following a previous iconic image. There are no softer pictures. But at the same time, for me it’s really important to keep the number of images low. I want to remember the book in my head”.

Personal circumstances also had an influence on the work Soth produced. “My mother-in-law lived with me and my wife for years while she was ill with cancer and during a leave of absence she got very, very ill. I was at her death bed and it changed my work. I became more courageous and the death theme emerged very strongly.”

Death is everywhere in Soth’s work. There are cemeteries, gravestones, memorial murals and a landscape of the cobbled banks of the Mississippi where the singer Jeff Buckley swam to his death. An old hospital bed in a deserted farmhouse echoes the time Soth spent at his mother-in-law’s death bed, while a sad portrait shows Lenny, a muscle bound construction worker and erotic masseur whose teenage son had recently died in a traffic accident. “My dream,” wrote Lenny, “is to live to be 100 and still look the way I do now”.

Soth’s dream was to make a great book. “I produced an ink jet book and made 50 of them in Spring 2003. I gave them away and people responded to them very quickly and soon publishers were interested. I approached Steidl and the book came out. It was like a dream come true”.

Since then, Soth’s dream has entered the realms of fantasy. Rejecting the imprecations of the art world, he joined Magnum as a nominee.

“I chose Magnum because I’m in love with that whole tradition. I always remember what Capa said to Cartier-Bresson “Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear.” I do have the capacity to be self-indulgent and I can be over-poetic, so it’s really healthy to do assignments.”

Soth’s latest project is on newly-weds honeymooning at Niagara Falls but with Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has already created a classic. With its focus on universally recognisable themes, it transcends its American roots to become a book that is accessible to people everywhere - the first work from a man who has the charm, vision and intelligence to become one of the truly great photographers.

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