Spreading the Web
Tim Hetherington has worked in West Africa for 8 years, his medium format colour images providing a complex insight into a region where the boundaries of political and military power are continually shifting. Hetherington’s West African odyssey began in 1999. “I heard about this Liberian football team called the Millennium Stars. They were supported by an non-governmental organisation ( NGO ) and were touring the UK,” says Hetherington. “I went to the NGO and I said, I can get a great story connecting Liberia to the UK through football. I want to be on their tour bus. The NGO said yes, sure, if you can get the story into a magazine. The story was published in the Independent and the NGO said they needed a photographer and a cameraman in Africa. They flew me out to Liberia and paid for accommodation, film and processing. That’s how I started to work in Liberia.”
Hetherington’s use of an NGO to gain initial access to Liberia typifies the increasingly important role NGOs play in funding and providing opportunities for photographers around the world.
“The first time I started working with NGOs was in the late 90s in Sierra Leone,” says Marcus Bleasdale, whose work in Congo has won international acclaim. “Initially I used them to gain access and information, but as your experience grows you have more to offer and you can get more in payment or compensation. This compensation may come in terms of exhibitions, books published, access or simply a place to sleep for a night. In the work I do at Human Rights Watch, I get paid very little, but my relationship with the organisation gets me grants and funding from elsewhere that helps my work be shown and allows me to have a more powerful voice.”
Security and information are two key issues for Bath based photographer, Matt Shonfeld. “I work for Orbis who have operations all over the world. I’ve worked with them in places like Bangladesh where gaining access to places like state run hospitals would be difficult. I also work with MSF and Unicef so I can cover stories which would take years of research. They also provide accommodation and security. Working with NGOs gives you the ability to work freely and safely and that is very important.”
Though Delhi based photographer Stuart Freedman has traded access for images on occasions, he also feels that reasonable payment is essential. “Photographers have to act in a professional way. We are all, regrettably in a market place. Selling your photography for a pittance for exposure or 'jam tomorrow' has landed us all in the position of negotiating from weakness. It's not that NGOs by and large are taking advantage. We as photographers have to accept some responsibility for taking bad deals.”
An NGO can be everything from a local toy library to the United Nations, and each NGO has different visual needs. “There are lots of NGOs,” says Tim Hetherington, “and different organisations have different agendas. In Chad, I worked for Human Rights Watch. They exist to expose abuse. They don’t need funding, they don’t need to provide images for marketing, they need photographs for evidence, so there is no editorial guidance.”
In contrast to the evidential documentary needs of Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace uses images for marketing that tie in with their campaigning agenda.
“We don’t have to look for people. They come to us,” says Daphne Christelis, Greenpeace UK’s photo-editor. “I’ll ask for a link to a website and then ask the photographer to come in and show their portfolio. I’m interested in people with a background in press photography, people who are committed to what Greenpeace are trying to do.”
“Some people do come thinking that they are going to photograph dolphins, but our work is very fast-paced. When you are shooting on an inflatable for example, you have to be able to think and work very quickly, and because a lot of our work involves trespass, photographers can get arrested and get into trouble.”
“We pay the same as standard press rates. Sometimes we’ll pay more. It depends on the skills of the photographer. We do a long edit of about 30 pictures which we have exclusive use of for 90 days. After that photographers can use these pictures for their own projects.”
Laurence Watts, photo-editor at Action Aid, has a line of wannabe NGO photographers queuing outside his door, but he says NGOs increasingly work with photographers in the field. “A photographer I know will give me their mobile number and say I will be in this place at this time. If an emergency or disaster situation arises or a project pops up, then we might get in touch. We need shots which show our work and the challenging situation of poor people in a variety of situations. And the people who shoot this work are increasingly locally based photographers.”
“Editorial is also marketing,” says Watts. “We do have a visual identity, but it is important that we try to avoid clichés, that we try to make people engage with the issues. We can do this by using intelligent photographers who have an understanding of development, politics and history, who can tell stories and show people as people, not as victims.”
Given the nature of assignments, avoiding clichés is not always an easy thing. “A bog standard NGO assignment is pretty boring,” says Adrian Evans, director of Panos Pictures. “You go there and shoot wells, clinics or primary schools being opened and once a photographer has done that ten times, you know what needs to be done.”
“NGOs are stuck. On the one hand they say they have gone away from the pleading image of the big-eyed child, but they have to work with marketing and fund-raising and raise awareness of particular issues and what the NGO does. And then the images they use are the same ones because that’s what people respond to.”
This is a problem Tim Hetherington, who was the only photographer to work with the LURD rebels in Liberia and has broken news stories like the spread of the Darfur War to Chad, believes is especially apparent in Africa. “I don’t disagree with working with NGOs, but it’s problematic to look at Africa only through NGO and news lenses. The problem with Africa is about more than just debt and money. The problem with Africa is how Africa is perceived and represented as a basket case.”
“The NGOs have a problem. They have been railroaded into stereotypical images. They know they need to counter these images, but at the same time they know these images work. There is also an emphasis on victims. In my more recent work, I want to identify the aggressors, who did this, who is responsible for this. That’s why I like Human Rights Watch.”
If making new types of images is important, so is showing that work to new audiences. “I did an exhibition at UBS in Switzerland highlighting the illegal export of gold from eastern Congo by European, especially Swiss, companies,” says Marcus Bleasdale. “We invited UBS shareholders and companies who were implicated in the import of the gold. It was a naming and shaming exercise where we provided visual evidence of what was happening. You know that if the US$80 million that is buying the gold does not go into Congo, the war will stop because that is the money that is buying the guns. We managed to prevent Swiss companies from importing gold from eastern Congo. More and more photographers are trying to work in this way.”
This new way of exhibiting work is typical of the innovative work photographers must do to show their work and make a living in a rapidly changing market.
“If you talk to older photographers, they say everything is going down the pan but they are confusing change with a dying part of the industry. The industry is shifting from newspapers and magazines to other forms of funding,” says Adrian Evans.
Stuart Freedman agrees. “I think there are less major commissions now than ever. NGOs are a small part of an increasingly complex process to generate income that comprises grants, magazines, self finance and often just plain luck. The NGO market has got bigger and the media market smaller. But ask around and you soon discover that the most successful photographers are those who spread their web as far as possible in search of income.” So in Delhi, Freedman is doing written, film and photographic work for The Guardian, Action Aid and corporate clients. From Bath, Matt Shonfeld combines photography and work for the Digital Railroad online archive, Marcus Bleasdale’s Congo work is getting shown to the unconverted thanks to a series of grants and awards he has been awarded. And Tim Hetherington? He’s taking a year out from photography to monitor security issues for the United Nations Security Council. Nobody, it seems, is be just a photographer anymore.
End
Friday, 27 March 2009
Alec Soth: Niagara - 2006
Falling In Love Again
Alec Soth’s first book, Sleeping in the Mississippi, was so sweeping in its epic statements, it seemed that Soth had nothing left to photograph. What could he do next?
The answer is Niagara, a portrayal of the town that has traditionally been the romance capital of North America. In Niagara, Soth sets out to capture the grand passion of life, to do for love and marriage what Sleeping in the Mississippi does for the American Midwest.
“Niagara is part of American mythology. It’s a place of romance, where people go to get married,” says Soth. “But when I got there my view of the place totally changed. The American side is economically devastated. It’s bleak.”
While the American side is bleak, the Canadian side is tacky. Cheesy motels, tacky tourist sites and a plethora of fast-food outlets make the town, the Falls notwithstanding, more Blackpool or Clacton than Paris or Rome.
As Soth began photographing, he also discovered the people of Southern Ontario and New York State are a tad more distrusting and a mite more suspicious than the easygoing folk of the Mississippi states. “The longer I spent there, the darker it got,” he says. “Part of that is down to me and my nature, part of it is down to the place itself. But I also find a real beauty in that darkness.”
It is a darkness evident in Soth’s portraits which form the soul of Niagara. In Aleisha and Joe, Aleisha has a hard-edged awareness etched into her face. Joe is more feral, his face a picture of opportunism gone awry. And for all their young love, he holds her in an alleyway where fencing, cables and a coal hole are the backdrop. Similarly Michelle and Pedro are portrayed against the drabbest of surroundings. Michelle, like many of Soth’s subjects, has a fragile quality to her, something so delicate and tender it makes her vulnerable, a vulnerability Pedro, in his cone-shaped party hat, looks ill-equipped to cater for.
Melissa poses outside the Flamingo Inn. She is a big bride in a big dress and looks lovely - but the taffeta white of her wedding gown against the barren walls of her motel talks of how her dreams will fade into a reality beyond her control.
This reality hits hardest with Rebecca. Clutching a young baby, she looks worn-out and bedraggled, her hunched shoulders and darkened eyes betraying a life of lost hope and sleepless nights. Her passion spent, she stands on cracked tarmac, a rock to one side, an ugly flat-roofed building behind.
It is not all bleakness though. Occasionally the love shines through, especially when Soth asks his subjects to pose naked to make his images more intimate. So we see Michelle and James, both naked and both on their second marriage, their large bodies emanating a tender comfort and confidence in each other’s company that transcends the blandness of their motel surroundings.
Inevitably, asking people to pose naked brought trouble to Soth. On one occasion he asked a young man he met if he could photograph him and his girlfriend naked. “He said he’d do it, then I saw her and she was only 16 and too young, so I decided to photograph them outside on the grass,” says Soth. “But while I was doing this, someone saw us and called the police saying I was a paedophile, and this cop came running up to us and I had to explain what I was doing.”
The ugly architecture of Niagara is a running theme throughout the book, the regulated functionality of the town’s motels an allusion to hidden passion played out behind closed doors. At the Seneca, blue and green bucket chairs stand under stone cladding. Beneath hastily-drawn curtains, oil stained pavements are streaked with skid marks leading directly to the door - hinting at the urge of love, Niagara style.
Symbols of romance recur through all the motels but they seem fraudulent and shallow. The heart-shaped bath (and is that Soth we see in the mirror there?) and towels folded into kissing swans are overwhelmed by the brutality of the everyday - cracked tarmac, empty car parks and grey skies that hint at what lies beneath the surface of our transitory passion.
If anyone hasn’t quite got the message that love and marriage might not be all it’s cracked up to be, the love letters Soth collected should put them right. “To gather the love letters I would ask people I met in bars or donut shops if they had any old love letters I could have,” says Soth. “If you’re in a donut shop and you ask someone at the next table for their old love letters, they are going to look at you like you’re a freak and mock you. But every once in a while, someone would have them and be happy to share them.”
The most extreme letters take you straight to the point where love slides into hate. “I love you but you’ve become a piece of shit,” begins one. Others are more telling in their banalities, whether it be the woman who bemoans her partner’s lack of hygiene, or the cliche-ridden missive that reads like a track listing of a greatest ever love songs CD. “You take my breath away..., You give me hope when I am down...,” and “I can’t live if living is without you.”
“A lot of the pictures are of the aftermath of passion and love. You see couples and their love letters and then you see the aftermath and the Falls could be a metaphor for the crashing passion,” says Soth. The Falls appear throughout the book, the images gathering pace to their tumultuous conclusion. So to end the book, we see the Niagara river heading inexorably to its fate, the river collapsing into the maelstrom of the whirlpool below. First comes love, then comes the fall. Niagara is beautiful, claustrophobic and dark, an intensely poetic and thoughtful work on the disappointment of broken dreams, a work rooted in one place but universal to all.
END
Alec Soth’s first book, Sleeping in the Mississippi, was so sweeping in its epic statements, it seemed that Soth had nothing left to photograph. What could he do next?
The answer is Niagara, a portrayal of the town that has traditionally been the romance capital of North America. In Niagara, Soth sets out to capture the grand passion of life, to do for love and marriage what Sleeping in the Mississippi does for the American Midwest.
“Niagara is part of American mythology. It’s a place of romance, where people go to get married,” says Soth. “But when I got there my view of the place totally changed. The American side is economically devastated. It’s bleak.”
While the American side is bleak, the Canadian side is tacky. Cheesy motels, tacky tourist sites and a plethora of fast-food outlets make the town, the Falls notwithstanding, more Blackpool or Clacton than Paris or Rome.
As Soth began photographing, he also discovered the people of Southern Ontario and New York State are a tad more distrusting and a mite more suspicious than the easygoing folk of the Mississippi states. “The longer I spent there, the darker it got,” he says. “Part of that is down to me and my nature, part of it is down to the place itself. But I also find a real beauty in that darkness.”
It is a darkness evident in Soth’s portraits which form the soul of Niagara. In Aleisha and Joe, Aleisha has a hard-edged awareness etched into her face. Joe is more feral, his face a picture of opportunism gone awry. And for all their young love, he holds her in an alleyway where fencing, cables and a coal hole are the backdrop. Similarly Michelle and Pedro are portrayed against the drabbest of surroundings. Michelle, like many of Soth’s subjects, has a fragile quality to her, something so delicate and tender it makes her vulnerable, a vulnerability Pedro, in his cone-shaped party hat, looks ill-equipped to cater for.
Melissa poses outside the Flamingo Inn. She is a big bride in a big dress and looks lovely - but the taffeta white of her wedding gown against the barren walls of her motel talks of how her dreams will fade into a reality beyond her control.
This reality hits hardest with Rebecca. Clutching a young baby, she looks worn-out and bedraggled, her hunched shoulders and darkened eyes betraying a life of lost hope and sleepless nights. Her passion spent, she stands on cracked tarmac, a rock to one side, an ugly flat-roofed building behind.
It is not all bleakness though. Occasionally the love shines through, especially when Soth asks his subjects to pose naked to make his images more intimate. So we see Michelle and James, both naked and both on their second marriage, their large bodies emanating a tender comfort and confidence in each other’s company that transcends the blandness of their motel surroundings.
Inevitably, asking people to pose naked brought trouble to Soth. On one occasion he asked a young man he met if he could photograph him and his girlfriend naked. “He said he’d do it, then I saw her and she was only 16 and too young, so I decided to photograph them outside on the grass,” says Soth. “But while I was doing this, someone saw us and called the police saying I was a paedophile, and this cop came running up to us and I had to explain what I was doing.”
The ugly architecture of Niagara is a running theme throughout the book, the regulated functionality of the town’s motels an allusion to hidden passion played out behind closed doors. At the Seneca, blue and green bucket chairs stand under stone cladding. Beneath hastily-drawn curtains, oil stained pavements are streaked with skid marks leading directly to the door - hinting at the urge of love, Niagara style.
Symbols of romance recur through all the motels but they seem fraudulent and shallow. The heart-shaped bath (and is that Soth we see in the mirror there?) and towels folded into kissing swans are overwhelmed by the brutality of the everyday - cracked tarmac, empty car parks and grey skies that hint at what lies beneath the surface of our transitory passion.
If anyone hasn’t quite got the message that love and marriage might not be all it’s cracked up to be, the love letters Soth collected should put them right. “To gather the love letters I would ask people I met in bars or donut shops if they had any old love letters I could have,” says Soth. “If you’re in a donut shop and you ask someone at the next table for their old love letters, they are going to look at you like you’re a freak and mock you. But every once in a while, someone would have them and be happy to share them.”
The most extreme letters take you straight to the point where love slides into hate. “I love you but you’ve become a piece of shit,” begins one. Others are more telling in their banalities, whether it be the woman who bemoans her partner’s lack of hygiene, or the cliche-ridden missive that reads like a track listing of a greatest ever love songs CD. “You take my breath away..., You give me hope when I am down...,” and “I can’t live if living is without you.”
“A lot of the pictures are of the aftermath of passion and love. You see couples and their love letters and then you see the aftermath and the Falls could be a metaphor for the crashing passion,” says Soth. The Falls appear throughout the book, the images gathering pace to their tumultuous conclusion. So to end the book, we see the Niagara river heading inexorably to its fate, the river collapsing into the maelstrom of the whirlpool below. First comes love, then comes the fall. Niagara is beautiful, claustrophobic and dark, an intensely poetic and thoughtful work on the disappointment of broken dreams, a work rooted in one place but universal to all.
END
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.
--END--
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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