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“… I would gather these objects and just look at them and think about this medium. About what it means to be a photographer, and the different ways in which photographs live in the world. This desire to memorialize life, when life is just going to keep clipping on by.” — Alec Soth

Opening in January 2022 will be an unprecedented three-gallery exhibition of a new body of work by artist Alec Soth, A Pound of Pictures. Running roughly concurrently at Sean Kelly in New York, Fraenkel in San Francisco, and Weinstein Hammons in Minneapolis, the exhibition – resulting from a series of road trips taken between 2018 and 2021 – explores the nature of photography itself and the artist’s relationship to it both as a practitioner and collector. To preview the exhibition, our friends at Bower Blue visited Soth at his studio in Minneapolis and produced this video featuring a candid conversation with the artist about the project.

From Sean Kelly:

This new body of work brings together images Soth completed between 2018 and 2021. As is often his custom, Soth began A Pound of Pictures by taking a series of road trips, in this case on a quest to further explore a deeper connection between the ephemerality and physicality of photography as a medium. Depicting a vast array of subjects — from Buddhist statues and birdwatchers to sun-seekers and busts of Abraham Lincoln — this series reflects on the photographic desire to pin down and crystallize experience, especially as it is represented and recollected by printed images.

Throughout this kaleidoscopic sequence of images runs the iconography of daily life: souvenirs, mementos, and images of images. Soth describes this narrative, writing, “If the pictures…are about anything other than their shimmering surfaces…they are about the process of their own making.” Soth, who is not only a photographer, but an inveterate collector of photographs, describes the works in this exhibition as arising out of a wish to understand the “weight” of photography both philosophically and metaphorically, as in the emotional weight of images. The exhibition takes its title from a vendor Soth discovered on his travels in Los Angeles who sells photographs by the pound. Both poetic and prosaic, the images that comprise A Pound of Pictures demonstrate Soth’s and others’ longing to “memorialize life while life continues to keep flipping by.” Mining the history of his own oeuvre, from the first major series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, to more recent images, A Pound of Pictures, becomes a deeply self-reflective interrogation of Soth’s entire body of work.