Alec Soth & Maud Sulter

3 thoughts on “Alec Soth & Maud Sulter”

• I visited Alex Soth’s exhbition in London and would agree that it is a must see. I am not sure whether there will also be the video in Bradford but if it is then it is worth at least watching part of it. It is an hour long and tells the story of how he finds his people and photographs their lives.

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  • I don’t think video is showing, but there is a special screening of it in the museum’s IMAX, which would be quite something!

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• Just a bit more info on these exhibitions – a taster for those who have booked and for anyone else who wants to come along.
  After self-publishing a short run of Sleeping by the Mississippi, Steidl published the book and immediately sold out. Alec Soth suddenly became the hottest documentary photographer. Several books and many international exhibitions have followed. He has also started his own publishing company Little Brown Mushroom http://www.littlebrownmushroom.com/
  Although widely reported as the first, this is (still only) his second exhibition in the UK: the first was ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’ at The Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool in 2004/5. ‘Gathered Leaves’ shows his disparate projects thus far, from the initial following of people’s lives along of America’s longest river, to photographing hermits and recluses living ‘off grid’, to using a fake newspaper as a cover to infiltrate small-town America. One of my students saw this exhibition recently and didn’t understand this part (‘off grid’) of the exhibition. Her partner, who has visited the southern states said that it is, ‘like a series of snapshots of everyday life, it was exactly what the people looked like and [that they] did the same things’.
  It’s increasingly rare to see anyone working in a traditional documentary style coming to the fore now: moving amongst people to produce work that is subtle, lyrical and eloquent. He’s more interested in the place and people than the aesthetics of the image, yet they are often beautiful. On closer examination, Soth has recurring symbols that link parts of his works, such as crosses and beds. Sometimes his images also reference other photographers, such as William Eggleston, Ansel Adams and Weegee.
  After lunch we can go across the road to the Impressions Gallery to see a very different show: Maud Sulter’s ‘Passion’. This exhibition exhibits staged portraits as well as collaged multi-media images, themed on politics, gender and race. Sulter was a poet as well as a visual artist and many of her works are intertwined with her writing. She researched Black women in Europe throughout history, re-creating (for example) portraits of black women dating back to the early 16th Century court of King James the 4th of Scotland.
  It will be interesting to compare these two exhibitions, each concerned primarily with storytelling, yet remarkably different.

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