Alec Soth's photographs are produced over long periods of travel, mostly around the Midwest and the Southern United States. They are often site-specific, showing strangers and desolate landscapes. His work tends to focus on the 'off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America' according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth.
Read MoreDrawn to Diane Arbus' photographs, Soth traveled to the Mississippi River to make Sleeping by the Mississippi, a self-printed book featuring landscapes and portraits that led to his participation in the Whitney Biennial in 2004. The book was made over five years and first published by Steidl in 2004. One of the images, Charles, which shows a bearded man holding two planes, was used for the biennial's poster.
Soth has been photographing different parts of America following the publication of Sleeping by the Mississippi. His second book, NIAGARA, was published in 2006 and showed photographs of married couples after their wedding, centered around a particular chapel in Niagara Falls.
For Broken Manual, Soth looked into places people go to retreat from civilisation. Over four years, the artist photographed monks, hermits, and runaways to create an underground guide for those looking to get away from life, produced under the pseudonym Lester B. Morrison.
Subsequent publications like Last Days of W document a country exhausted by the presidency of George W. Bush. These images are included in From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, a compilation of Soth's work since the 1990s.
