New exhibition: A personal perspective of the USA

From Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas, to Terrence Malick’s I and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, the evocative motif of the great American road trip is familiar to us from countless movies. And that theme is at the heart of a new exhibition – Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth – which opens at the National Media Museum in Bradford today.

Soth is recognised as one of America’s greatest contemporary photographers and Gathered Leaves is his first major UK exhibition outside London, quite a coup for Bradford. It brings together four series – Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2014) – the result of extensive journeys Soth has made in the US over a ten-year period.

His images are stark and beautifully composed. Without being overtly political, they nevertheless bring to the fore American lives that would otherwise remain hidden, working both as powerful social documentary and moving snapshots of humanity in all its joy, pathos, complication and vulnerability. Mostly shot on a large-format camera and containing a strong ‘storyline’, each collection functions as a form of extended narrative.

“I think of my process as being more like a filmmaker,” explains Soth. “Each series has a theme and takes around three years to complete. With each project there is always this relationship to my interest in the outside world of the United States but it’s also driven by some sort of interior motivation. Sleeping by the Mississippi was my first time doing a long road trip and it was really about that youthful wanderlust in the American tradition.” Photographs in this series include a group of people picnicking in a cemetery in Louisiana, a sad-looking girl sitting alone in a Minnesota bar, a middle-aged lady in Mississippi holding up ‘a photograph of an angel’. There are run-down interiors – apartments, bars and hotel rooms – that hint at the lives of the people inhabiting those spaces and bleakly beautiful landscapes, often with evidence of human intervention – an abandoned mattress floating in a river, a ramshackle houseboat, a battered sofa and chairs in a woodland clearing. The pictures are also, somehow, exuberant; they exude a sense of adventure and moving on.

“Niagara was a much darker project,” says Soth. “I was thinking about love and desire and its aftermath.” Niagara Falls is a popular honeymoon destination (as well as a notorious suicide spot). This darkness is reflected in the images in the series which include an awkward-looking groom in an ill-fitting suit, a forlorn young woman sitting outside a motel room in her wedding dress and a box of wedding rings in a pawn shop. Also featured in the series are a number of intimate nude portraits of newlywed couples and photographs of love letters.

Soth’s two most recent projects are both connected and in opposition to each other. “Broken Manual is about the desire to run away from society – I always joked that it was my mid-life crisis project,” he says. “And Songbook is really about wanting to reconnect with society.” The images in Broken Manual chart the lives of those who have chosen to live on the margins of society or to withdraw from it completely – survivalists, hermits and monks feature – and are possibly some of Soth’s most haunting. The American wilderness has never looked more desolate (or striking) and the people in the photographs – male, bearded, unkempt, intense – almost look like they belong to a different era, they have the air of 19th century pioneers.

For Songbook he went on the road photographing schools, social clubs, supermarkets and community events, investigating real-life human interaction in our modern world of virtual social networks. Shot in black and white using a flash, they have a joyful, nostalgic feel. Soth cites American documentary photographers Robert Adams, Walker Evans and William Eggleston as influences. However he says he has been equally inspired by British artists Andy Galsworthy and Richard Long – as a young artist he, like them, made sculptures in, and motivated by, the landscape.

“It was while I was documenting the project by taking photographs that I came across Robert Adams’ work. That was my principal interest – being outdoors and exploring, I found that attractive.” His decision to then move in to photography had, he says, “nothing to do with Magnum Photos or photojournalism – it was really about the process.”

Literature and writers also provide him with inspiration, although perhaps not the obvious ones. The seminal On the Road, for example, doesn’t really figure. “Jack Kerouac wasn’t so much of an influence for me,” he says. “That kind of beatnik thing – I’m not a beatnik, I’m pretty bland and conventional. I have always drawn from poetry, though, because I think poetry functions much in the same way as photography.” And he likes the “middle-America sensibility” of Mark Twain’s work.

Soth was born in Minnesota and, when he’s not travelling, still lives there. “I just identify with the great middle of America,” he says. “And it’s a lot more complex that it is given credit for.” It is this complexity that is celebrated in his photography. His images leave a lasting impression, leading the viewer on their own journey of imagination and questioning – and there is always, necessarily, something held back. “Photographs have that fragmentary sense,” he says. “A big part of it is allowing viewers the space to fill in that information.”

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minnesota. He studied art at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

“I don’t think of myself as an authority on documenting America,” says Soth. “I think of myself as working out my own personal stuff.”

Gathered Leaves also includes the 2010 documentary somewhere to Disappear, which follows Soth as he worked on the Broken Manual project.

The exhibition is at the National Media Museum, Bradford from April 22-June 26. On April 23 there will a gallery talk at the Museum by associate curator Tim Clark at 2pm.