January 20 – March 7, 2009
Another fantastic group of Americurbana from this wonderful photographer!
MB
Alec Soth
‘Civic Fest, Minneapolis, MN (Presidential office)’
2008
“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.”
Alec Soth on the Gagosian Gallery website
Alec Soth
‘Dynell, Bemidji, MN (Girl in store)’
2007
Alec Soth
‘Josh, Joelton, Tennessee’
2004
“Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “The Last Days of W.,” color photographs taken by Alec Soth between 2000 and 2008.
Although originally conceived without explicit political intent, in retrospect Soth considers this selected body of work, which spans both terms of George W. Bush’s presidency, to represent “a panoramic look at a country exhausted by its catastrophic leadership.” Soth’s earlier series such as “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” “NIAGARA,” and “Dog Days, Bogotá” – all subjective narratives containing disenfranchised figures and decaying landscapes — laid the conceptual groundwork for “The Last Days of W.” It provides a wry commentary on the adverse effects of the national administration, perhaps best exemplified by an unwittingly ironic remark that Bush made in 2000: “I think we can agree, the past is over.”
‘The Last Days of W’ installation view at Gagosian Gallery
“Following in the humanist tradition established by the great chroniclers of the American experience such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore, Soth captures diverse images of a country disillusioned with, and deceived by, its own identity, from mothers of marines serving in Iraq to teenage mothers in the Louisiana Bayou; from religious propaganda in the American workplace to the mortgage crisis in Stockton, CA. His incisive depiction of contemporary American reality confronts the ideals romanticized in the American Dream with the hastening decline of the American Empire.”
Alec Soth
‘Home Environment, Billings, MT’
2008
Alec Soth
‘Republican National Convention, Saint Paul, MN’
2008
Text from the Gagosian Gallery website
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