The touring exhibition “Gathered Leaves” opened in London in 2015, bringing together a decade of four emblematic works: Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2012-2014). Added is A Pound of Pictures (2022), created over a series of road trips across the US from 2018 to 2021. The presentation has been designed to reflect the evolution of these individual series and their passage from artwork or page to the gallery wall. The title “Gathered Leaves” refers on one hand to photography as assembled leaves of paper and on the other to a verse of the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself (1855) which evokes the diversity of the American nation on the eve of civil war. The early 21st century America that Alec Soth depicts is also a tense period caught between contradictory desires of individualism and community.
Soth is above all an American photographer. His most famous photographs represent people and places discovered while travelling the length and breadth of the United States. The American landscape – the Mississippi, the Niagara Falls, the great wild and open spaces, smalltown suburbia – frame his poetic study of his fellow citizens’ lives. His work can be distinguished however by a very unique sense of what “documentary” means. As he says, it is not about capturing a precise moment, but rather making things stop in order to look at them: “For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to a subject as it is about the subject itself.”
Curator: Magnum Photos.
In association with Magnum Photos.
