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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

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Alec Soth
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Photographer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Experience
Charges
Artist
Conceptual
Didn
Pretend
Make
Print
People
Buying
Uncomfortable
Photographer
Understand
Prints

More quotes by Alec Soth

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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.
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Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
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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.
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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 like the annoying guy in the street.
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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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In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?
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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.
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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, 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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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.
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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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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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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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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It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a complete mystery to me.
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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Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.
Alec Soth