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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
Always
Gaps
Closest
Fill
Leaves
Photography
Viewer
Poetry
Cousin
Imagination
Viewers
Way
Sparks

More quotes by Alec Soth

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I'm like the annoying guy in the street.
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Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If limitation spawns creativity, is the limitless resource of the Internet a good thing?
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Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
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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.
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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.
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For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
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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
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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.
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.
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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.
Alec Soth