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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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Alec Soth
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Photographer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
People
Included
Strangers
Prefer
Stranger
Guess
Mystery
Comfortable
Never
Photographing

More quotes by Alec Soth

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