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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.

Alec Soth

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Alec Soth
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Photographer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Photography
Viewer
Poetry
Cousin
Imagination
Viewers
Way
Sparks
Always
Gaps
Closest
Fill
Leaves

More quotes by Alec Soth

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Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
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People can talk about the death of social life or whatever it's not necessarily how I see it. It's more musical in the sense, where it's a feeling about the place I live, slash, who I am in the place.
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It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a complete mystery to me.
Alec Soth
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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.
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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.
Alec Soth
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Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.
Alec Soth
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I admire photographers that don't need a destination. In some ways, street photography is like that. There's a quality of wanderlust for sure in my work, but I need a destination.
Alec Soth
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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.
Alec Soth
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Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling.
Alec Soth
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For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.
Alec Soth
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Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
Alec Soth
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I'm like the annoying guy in the street.
Alec Soth
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You can photograph anything. You can be inside, outside, doesn't matter, you're controlling the light. It gives you great flexibility. That was a primary motivation.
Alec Soth
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I'm a project-based photographer I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.
Alec Soth
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For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.
Alec Soth
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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.
Alec Soth
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If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.
Alec Soth
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[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.
Alec Soth
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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.
Alec Soth
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I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers.
Alec Soth