Alec Soth Quotes

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers.

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience.

Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language.

In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest.