Alec Soth, Quan Am Monastery. Memphis, Tennessee, 2021, archival pigment print, 24 x 30″. All images copyright © Alec Soth. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York.

On his travels across the United States, the photographer Alec Soth likes to visit Buddhist temples, and he sometimes asks the monks if photography, with its “desire to stop and possess time,” is antithetical to their teachings. He reports that the response is often some variation on “No, I love taking pictures!” After one such interaction in Connecticut, he found that the monk in question had even tagged him in a photo on Facebook. The average American monk, it seems, isn’t concerned about whether the photographic impulse may be a neurotic one born of upādāna, or worldly attachment. Soth, though, clearly is. 

Since publishing his now canonical 2004 book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has been one of the great visual chroniclers of the American condition. His work, armed with Walker Evans’s docu-formalism, fights William Eggleston’s “war with the obvious”; it captures the country’s psychosocial landscape, examining who we are and how we feel, collectively. But his new project, A Pound of Pictures, takes a turn inward. Here, America as Soth finds it serves less as a subject than as a vehicle to examine the photographic medium itself, and his relationship to it. The book and the exhibition play on our desire to memorialize, to preserve pieces of experience. Many of these images contain another photograph somewhere in the frame—there are, by my count, seven pictures of people taking pictures—and interwoven throughout are a handful of portraits of well-known image makers: Sophie Calle, Duane Michals, Nancy Rexroth. 

When Soth began this body of work, he wasn’t intending to make photographs about photographs. His original plan was to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, “in an attempt to mourn the divisiveness in America.” But the project, he writes, felt “lifeless.” So, he abandoned the approach, trying to think less and feel more, allowing his camera to be oriented by an inner compass—the instincts he doesn’t always understand but has learned to trust. The result is a project that is political only in that it asks a people mindlessly producing billions of images every day: What are we doing? And why are we doing it? 

I spoke to Soth over the phone just after touring his exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. I wanted to ask him some similar questions about the medium he has devoted his life to, and to push him on its efficacy and purpose. But Soth gives no definitive answers, either in our interview or in his photographs: both are characterized by his wandering curiosity. A selection of photographs from A Pound of Pictures follows the interview. 

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