Alec Soth

Alec Soth (born 1969) is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom. His major publications are Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures. He has received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, and in 2021 received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. His photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been exhibited widely including as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a major solo exhibition at Media Space in London in 2015.