Work of Alec Soth

Alex Soth

Gathered Leaves exhibition, Science Museum, 6 Oct 2015 - 28 Mar 2016

I’ve been researching the work of Alec Soth, partly as there is an OCA study day in January at the Science Museum that I would like to attend and partly as his name has come up several times lately as someone who takes pictures in the way that I  wish mine would. 

There is such vulnerability in his work that strikes a real accord with me.  The way he catches the subject(s) on film with no sense of them deliberately posing.  It looks like, in the majority of his single poses, that he used flash to illuminate the subject but, unless he has post processed his work with darkened edges, I would have thought he would have lost the spontaneity of the subjects.

In some of his wilderness pictures the juxtaposition of his subject within such wide open spaces but placed diagonally and horizontally in the centre of the picture, breaks all the thirds rules where the focal point should be either one third from top or bottom or one third from either edge.  As they say ‘you learn the rules to enable you to break them’ and it works well in Soth’s images. 

Examples of Soth's work at the Science Museum can be seen here:   Gathered Leaves Exhibition