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Alpher Xian: Your photographs have a dreamy quality to them. They seem to me that they come naturally, rather than just being “taken.” Do you research your subjects or do you know them intuitively? Do the pictures find you, or you do go out to look for the pictures? |
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To Write A Love Song – Alpher Xian
Alpher Xian: Your photographs have a dreamy quality to them. They seem to me that they come naturally, rather than just being “taken.” Do you research your subjects or do you know them intuitively? Do the pictures find you, or you do go out to look for the pictures?
Alec Soth: I usually have a list of things I’m looking for. I tape this list to my steering wheel and drive around. I rarely find the subjects on the list, but it gets me out in the world. It is like a treasure hunt. While I’m out looking, I sometimes stumble on something more surprising and wonderful than anything I could put on a list.
AX: What was your first visual memory?
AS: This is a particularly relevant question because I’m currently working on something that has to do with childhood memories. I grew up in a sort of no man’s land between the suburbs and the country. I spent a lot of time alone. One of my first visual memories is of the brindle coat on our lean and lanky Great Dane.
AX: I see your body of work as a requiem: a mourning song for the loss of hope and future. Yet you see all with a tender eye. If you were to compare your body of work to a song, what song would that be?
AS: With “Niagara,” I really tried to make the project like a love song. Specifically, I was thinking of Roy Orbison and those falsetto crescendos. The band Low uses a similar song structure. I often try to imagine their music as a soundtrack to my pictures.
AX: Some of your photographs from “Niagara” illustrate Niagara Falls in different times during a day. What was your approach to a site that’s been touched upon by so many fingertips, in order to make it your own?
AS: I try not to get scared off by a subject just because it is cliché. A creative musician can always find a new way to write a love song. A photographer should be able to find a way to photograph Niagara Falls.
AX: What is your response to Simon Norfolk’s statement: “The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics.” As a photographer, do you think you are making a social commentary when you take pictures?
AS: Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.” But I don’t think the world would have been a better place if these photographers had headed off to a war zone. The question is whether you can be a political photographer while you photograph rocks. My pictures don’t have a specific social commentary but I think they have social and political meaning.
AX: If you could pick any photographer to take your portrait (dead or alive), whom would you choose?
AS: This is a boring answer but it would have to be Avedon.
