Alec Soth
La Belle Damme Sans Mercy
[...]If John Keats often wrote poems in tribute to specific works and figures in
more or less recent history...Alec Soth follows a similar principle, setting
the foundations of his own series on bases supplied by Keats. The rooting
of Soth’s LBDSM does not stop here, though, because he raises on the solid Keatsian
platform a further level of quotations and many other references. Thus...his still-life
with a bowl and three pieces of fruit in the center harks back to Tony Harrison’s verses
in A Kumquat for John Keats, and an apparently ordinary city scene is actually a partial
reconstruction of a photo by Ruth Orkin, shot in Florence in 1951 and known by the
title An American Girl in Italy; it shows a young woman besieged by leering men. This
is a veiled statement of the process that Soth uses to create his images, exploiting
the possibilities of control and staging offered by what is known as “staged photog-
raphy” rather than (as he has done more often) merely recording the reality in front of
his eyes, without altering it in any way. This excessive adherence to the model leads
to the suspension of images deprived of the quality that’s usually (and naively) attrib-
uted to any photo: truthfulness. The result resembles awakening from a dream, ex-
actly what happens in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci toward the end of the poem.
What indubitably corresponded to reality until just a moment before turns out to be
an imitation[....]
Francesco Zanot
Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art produced a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. Alec Soth’s first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007) Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) The Last Days of W (2008), Broken Manual (2010). In 2008, Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, and is a member of Magnum Photos. In 2011, invited by the Rome Commission to portray the city he realised the project and the book La Belle Dame sans Merci.
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