Alec Soth: Work of world famous photographer goes on display in Bradford

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 – currently at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

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 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 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.” 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. 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 – have the air of 19th century pioneers. For Songbook he photographed 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 but 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. Born in Minnesota, Soth still lives there – when he’s not travelling. “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 his photography celebrates.

The exhibition is at the National Media Museum until June 26.