Alec Soth Quotes & Sayings

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in. — Alec Soth

It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a complete mystery to me. — Alec Soth

Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language. — Alec Soth

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it. — Alec Soth

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in. — Alec Soth

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures. — Alec Soth

In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point? — Alec Soth

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film. — Alec Soth

If limitation spawns creativity, is the limitless resource of the Internet a good thing? — Alec Soth

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people. — Alec Soth

If you want to be a creative person, then you're gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn't a path. Part of the creativity is making your path. — Alec Soth

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance. — Alec Soth

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter. — Alec Soth

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself. — Alec Soth

Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling. — Alec Soth

In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest. — Alec Soth

I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers. — Alec Soth

Photography is a very lonely medium. There's a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that's why I'm a photographer. — Alec Soth

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things. — Alec Soth

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life. — Alec Soth

I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience. — Alec Soth

Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window. — Alec Soth

I'm like the annoying guy in the street. — Alec Soth