Alec Soth: Artist Lecture

Lenny, Minneapolis, Minnesota 2002

I was excited to attend the Alec Soth lecture on Wednesday as there was a general buzz about him around the department. The large drama department theater was quite filled and a strange movie played for ten minutes before Soth himself took to the stage. His first discussion about "democratic photography" was interesting and I felt like it was an engaging way to start out the lecture. I agreed with a lot of his ideas about the over saturation of images and the difficulty of standing out in the photography crazy world. While this topic is extremely important just discussing it and basically saying that it is the unavoidable end to photography I feel is not the best way to handle it. A student lecture should be inspirational; "so what if the world is over saturated? There is always room for the creative to stand out" would have been a better response. I'm not saying to be blindly optimistic but to just trail off and speak bleakly about the future really has no place in a student lecture. There was definitely a theme from start to finish in the lecture in that each thing he talked about led into the next, much like his work. While he made some interesting points early on, I felt like as the conversation progressed the lecture went down hill in terms of his presentation and general demeanor.

At one point in the lecture he showed a project he called the "loneliest man in Minneapolis." I felt like this project was in its own way a strange metaphor for his body of work as well as the lecture itself. His worked claimed to be about this journey, a photographic adventure through the US, but all I saw was a lonely man trying to come to terms with his work and life. His images totally mirrored his personality: dry, cold and drowsy. His presentation was so lackluster that in a strange way it motivated me to realize that my own life is not so bad. What kind of artist gives a photography lecture to a predominately photography major student crowd and basically rants about how the art is dead? It just felt strange to me. I did enjoyed some of his work, but for the most part I felt like his attitude was so negative that it was hard to really relate to or enjoy the majority of his pieces.

Who really is the loneliest man around? The nurse strip club patron or the man talking to his dog and singing alone in a hotel room? If the video was going for charm, it failed, if it was going for comedy, it was creepy. If it was going for seriousness then I don't really know what to say. It was bizarre, out of place and awkward. Based just purely off of his images alone I may have been interested but throwing in his attempted sense of humor, negative attitude and lackluster uninspirational speech I just plain was not impressed. I've been to all of the lectures that I have been able to go to so far and I have to say that this one was definitely stood apart from the others. Very eye opening.