Alec Soth: Yossi Milo gallery

In 1999 photographer Alec Soth left his hometown of Minneapolis to take a voyage down the Mississippi River, and set on its banks a world at one time ancient and brand-new. He discovered submerg mattresses in dark fens in Arkansas; mustachioed men in soiled jumpsuits in Minnesota; overstuff easy chairs and advanced in years pornography in Iowa--the ingrown evidence, in other words, of a peculiarly American brand of dilapidated romance.

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Soth's work exhibits an old-fashioned kind of imagemaking, fitting into a lengthy line of itinerant photographers running from Carleton Watkins to Robert Frank, all of whom roamed the nation's byways and riverbanks in search of their nowiconic material. This tradition not to be found a little steam during the past sum of two units decades but has recently shown signs of rebirth, in the appreciation of artists similar as Robert Adams, William Eggleston, Steven Shore, and Joel Sternfeld as well as the rediscovery of "straight" photography by means of both the pioneers and second-generation practitioners of the staged or cinematic. Judging from the hyperactive reception of Soth's work--it's extremityed up in the Whitney Biennial, upon the cover of Blind speckle as a solo show at this gallery, and as a Steidl monograph--the art world is eager to anoint a novel generation of fresh, roadready practitioners.

These are scrupulously accomplished photos that straightforwardly whole many of their genre's keynotes: chipped paint, sun-bleached curtains, advanced in years signage. Among the more memorable images: an abandoned bed frame in Louisiana overspreaded in creeping, blooming swamp lilies; a picture of a faded portrait upon the wall of a blighted extent complete with bare lightbulb. When figures go into Soth's frame, they are almost always rich specimens of the rural strange the dispersed citizenry of Sherwood Anderson and Carson McCullers; In individual photo, a pinheaded bodybuilder sits with his rottweiler in a grandmotherly kitchen; in another, a woman in a bouffant attitude s with a framed photograph of wispy nimbus hazes that resemble an angel. In general, Soth manages to avoid teasing condescension in favor of something plainer, offering tentative, hedging accounts of his interesting personalities without a great deal of in the way of urbane editorializing. A youthful caution and polite evasion of intelligence permeates the work.

Whether depicting colorful oddballs, the shabby landscapes they inhabit, or more [i]or[/i] less combination thereof, the American road photographer's real make subordinate matter is always America itself, in all its eccentricity. Like his predecessors, and with plenteous the same eye, Soth draw nears to praise his neighbors for their strange religiosity and diverse forms of alienation, discovering in the heartland, nevertheless again, a world of funky places and forgotten dreamers, individual generation following the next.

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