{"id":82992,"date":"2015-02-27T11:45:56","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T16:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82992"},"modified":"2015-02-27T17:50:40","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T22:50:40","slug":"look-and-look-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/27\/look-and-look-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Look and Look Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

On <\/em>Songbook, Alec Soth\u2019s new\u00a0<\/em>photobook<\/i>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Williston,<\/a>

Customers waiting for Walmart to open. Williston, ND<\/em>, 2012, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you follow the gaze of every shopper pictured in Alec Soth\u2019s photograph of a crowded Walmart in North Dakota, you end up nowhere. The scene of big-box-store mayhem would have you think it\u2019s Black Friday or Super Bowl Sunday morning or the peak of the shelf-clearing shopping spree that is sure to precede doomsday. But in Williston, the city at the center of the oil boom that has afforded North Dakota the lowest unemployment rate in the country, this was just commerce as usual. It was a national story a few years ago: word spread fast that some incarnation of the American Dream was up for grabs in North Dakota, and scores of men and women from all over the U.S. loaded up the family van and set course for the Peace Garden State.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With this mind, it can be tempting to read Soth\u2019s photograph\u2014the empty shopping carts, the sweatpants in public, the claustrophobia-inducing crowd\u2014as acutely tragic. The journey to a new and better life ends here? There are consumer traffic jams in the promised land? The streets aren\u2019t paved with gold but with some sort of linoleum-vinyl composite?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet this picture is not meant as biting cultural commentary; it\u2019s not an attempt at myth-busting the American Dream. (If anyone knows that Gore-Tex and high-wattage fluorescents are part of our wondrous national experience, it\u2019s a Twin Cities native, Mall of America frequenter like Soth.) Instead, the tragedy lies in the total absence of connection or communication. Sure, if you flipped on the audio of this scene, there would likely be a cacophony of conversation, bits of which would reveal the presence of relationships, families, and friends. But in the moment captured, no one <\/i>is looking at anyone else. As crowded as the store is, each shopper has found somewhere private to rest his or her gaze. In this sea of people, everyone is, impressively, in a world all their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The photograph, like many in Soth\u2019s newest body of work, Songbook<\/em><\/a>, could easily serve as an illustration of Sheila Heti\u2019s \u201cStealing Glances,\u201d a 2005 essay on our tendency to avoid eye contact in public spaces. The opposite is also true: one of Heti\u2019s sentences could function as the caption for Soth\u2019s images: \u201cWhen we look and look away, we reveal what we want\u2014communion, citizenry\u2014and what we lack\u2014communion, citizenry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Fun<\/a>

Fun Valley. South Fork, Colorado<\/em>, 2013, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

Songbook<\/em>, with its candids of crowds and portraits of groups, its school dances and church gatherings, is definitively focused on American togetherness, or more accurately, our earnest attempts at it. In a way, this makes the work a thematic counterpoint to Soth\u2019s last major project, Broken Manual<\/em>, a survey on American escapism that was as off-the-grid as Songbook<\/em> is on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These two seemingly diametric endeavors both highlight the impossibility of finding fulfillment, at either end of the spectrum; both subtly undermine our desires for and conceptions of true connection or true escape. When Soth photographs community, whether its the sort that can be found in a bustling Walmart or the local chapter of a fraternal organization, there are hints of fragmentation. When he photographs solitude, there are traces of intimacy. Soth\u2019s partygoers end up lonely; his hermits end up with company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The last snow globe repairman. Northfield, Minnesota<\/em>, 2012, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s in this light that Songbook<\/em>\u00a0falls into place as the most recent installment from a photographer curious not about the American Dream, but the American Condition, an affliction perhaps born from that sense of unfulfillment (a cousin of Longing? A distant cousin of Hunger?). Soth, however, doesn\u2019t pursue a definition. In\u00a0the very Szarkowskian sense, his pictures \u201cpoint\u201d: they are handcrafted road signs, each uniquely complex but also carefully aimed toward that faceless beast that drives some of us into isolation, and others toward congregation. With equal parts Robert Frank and Alan Lomax, Soth roams the country investigating our mysterious national malady, not by searching for it outright, but by capturing its photographable manifestations: the very personal and sometimes peculiar ways we cope.<\/p>\n

Through Soth\u2019s lens, our hobbies\u2014golf with the ladies, football with the guys, snow-globe repair, skydiving, dancing, prayer\u2014reveal themselves as more than just pastimes. They are chosen strategies in the low-stakes game of First World survival, tactics in our quiet battle of continuing on. In short, Soth\u2019s photographs are microstudies in how we endure<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interwoven throughout the photographs of Songbook<\/em>\u00a0are lyrics of love and longing from Cole Porter, Howard Dietz, Sammy Cahn, and a handful of other great American songwriters. A line from Johnny Mercer\u2019s \u201cMoon River\u201d sits adjacent to a sterile image of an empty suburban street corner: \u201cWe\u2019re after the same rainbow\u2019s end waiting \u2019round the bend, my Huckleberry friend, Moon River and me.\u201d The last word in the book, however, is given to Romanian playwright, Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco: \u201cNo society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.\u201d The quote is a summary assertion that who<\/i> we are is the result of what<\/i> we are. It suggests that the individual worlds we create and identities we construct, no matter how splintered, are shaped by our shared instincts. And so, in some sense, everything we\u2019ve just seen\u2014Soth\u2019s kaleidoscopic view of mundane American life\u2014is born from a condition that is inherently universal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Lonnie's<\/a>

Lonnie\u2019s Roadside Cafe. Williston, ND<\/em>, 2012, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

Suddenly, Soth\u2019s photographs of Main Street, its dreary roadside caf\u00e9s and bleak landscapes, begin to look like portraits of battlegrounds, the settings of our daily skirmishes with Ionesco\u2019s \u201cpain of living.\u201d The muted black-and-white images aren\u2019t always pleasant\u2014Soth\u2019s picture of four men eating alone at four different tables can make you physically ache\u2014but by presenting the struggle, Soth reminds us that we share a common enemy. This is Songbook<\/em>\u2019s strength: It hints at the camaraderie available in our collective yearning for camaraderie, the community available in our collective yearning for community. A common enemy always unites.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Walt Whitman opened the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em> with a portrait of himself: strong, virile, \u201cone of the roughs.\u201d Soth opens Songbook<\/em>\u00a0with a portrait of a man named Bil from Sandusky, Ohio. Bil, smiling widely, is shown waltzing with an imaginary partner at Dance N Style (\u201cSandusky\u2019s premiere Latin-Ballroom Dance Studio & Dance Club\u201d)\u2014it seems he\u2019s the evening\u2019s odd man out. The scene is small-town USA at its smallest and quirkiest, and yet the photograph is reverent. Bil, after all, is toe-to-toe with the enemy, cheek-to-cheek with the beast, and he\u2019s grinning. Maybe he\u2019s blissfully ignorant to his pitiable situation. Maybe he\u2019s braver than the rest of us. Or maybe he knows that although he\u2019s dancing solo, he\u2019s not coping alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Dance<\/a>

Dance N Style. Sandusky, OH,<\/em>\u00a02012, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

Gideon Jacobs is a writer and the creative director at Magnum Photos.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSongbook\u201d is on view concurrently at Sean Kelly Gallery<\/a>,\u00a0in New York, through March 14;\u00a0Fraenkel Gallery<\/a>, in San Francisco, through April 4; and\u00a0Weinstein Gallery<\/a>, in Minneapolis, through April 4.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

All images courtesy\u00a0Alec Soth\/Magnum Photos.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Songbook, Alec Soth\u2019s new\u00a0photobook. If you follow the gaze of every shopper pictured in Alec Soth\u2019s photograph of a crowded Walmart in North Dakota, you end up nowhere. The scene of big-box-store mayhem would have you think it\u2019s Black Friday or Super Bowl Sunday morning or the peak of the shelf-clearing shopping spree that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":802,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[3514,10760,17189,3287,16698,5400,12507,100,395,2824,17188,5961],"class_list":["post-82992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alan-lomax","tag-alec-soth","tag-citizenry","tag-cole-porter","tag-community","tag-eugene-ionesco","tag-johnny-mercer","tag-photography","tag-robert-frank","tag-sheila-heti","tag-songbook","tag-walmart"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Alec Soth's New Photographs, a Fresh Take on Public Space<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Gideon Jacobs on community and citizenry in Alec Soth's new photobook, Songbook.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/27\/look-and-look-away\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Look and Look Away by Gideon Jacobs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 27, 2015 \u2013 On Songbook, Alec Soth\u2019s new\u00a0photobook. 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