Alec Soth — Songbook

Photographs of American communal life made between 2012 and 2014, taken out of the news stories they were first made for.

Soth, a Magnum photographer based in Minneapolis, was known above all for the lone figures of Broken Manual and Sleeping by the Mississippi when he turned to people gathering together. He took on the fading job of a local newspaper reporter, moving from one state to the next for The LBM Dispatch, the newspaper he published himself through his Little Brown Mushroom imprint with texts by the writer Brad Zellar, and on commissions from the New York Times among others.

In places from Silicon Valley to upstate New York he went to hundreds of dances, meetings, festivals and other gatherings, looking for people meeting face to face in an age of online networks. The book drops the original reporting, so that what remains is the wish for connection underneath. By turns funny and sad, the sequence sets American individualism against the urge to belong.

MACK, first published 2015. 144 pages with 75 tritone plates, debossed hardback, 28.5 x 27.3 cm.