Since the publication of his first major work "Sleeping by the Mississippi" (2014), Alec Soth has been one of the most important contemporary photographers worldwide.
His photographic series move between documentary photography and fine art, and examine the different forms of photography and their diverse modes of presentation.
Soth is a visual artist and photographer, member of the Magnum photo agency, blogger, publisher and educator - but sees himself primarily as an American photographer and acts in the tradition of his former teacher Joel Sternfeld.
The landscapes of the USA - from the Mississippi to Niagara Falls to the deserts and small towns and suburbs - form the starting point for his series, in which he documents the often contradictory ideas and facets of American society.
Soth's latest series "A Pound of Pictures" will be presented for the first time in Europe at Berlin Photo Week.
The exhibition can be seen in the Art Lab of the Loock Gallery.
The series and photo book A Pound of Pictures was created between 2018 and 2021. During his three-year journey, Soth accompanied his interns Molly, Cheryl, Alejandro, his former student Cooper and his daughter Carmen across the United States to capture aspects of American life with large format cameras and tripod to document.
At the same time as he was working on the series - first along the route of the funeral procession that transported Abraham Lincoln's body in the spring of 1865 and later along both American coasts - Soth began to actively deal with old photographs and to collect them at flea markets and on the Internet.
This stimulated him to deal with the process of image production and the circulation of photographic images and to incorporate these themes into the current series.
The title of the series was named after a flea market seller who offered old photographs by the pound.
A pound is therefore to be understood both literally as a unit of weight and metaphorically on an emotional level.
Alec Soth, born 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has published over 25 photo books, including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015) and I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating" (2019).
In the last two decades, the photographer has had over 50 solo exhibitions, including in Paris, Minnesota and London.
In 2008, Soth founded Little Brown Mushroom, a multimedia company focused on visual storytelling.
The exhibition runs as part of Berlin Photo Week from July 23 to September 4, 2022 in the Art Lab of the Reinbeckhallen Foundation. Reinbeckstr. 11, 12459 Berlin. The opening hours are Thursday to Friday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday to Sunday and public holidays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission 5 euros or 3 euros reduced.