digressions: a blog

I recently interviewed the obscure and little known artist Alec Soth for Too Much Chocolate, a web resource for emerging photographers. You can read the interview here.

Charles, Vasa, Minnesota 2002, © Alec Soth

Of course when I made that picture of Charles, no one was paying any attention to what I was working on, so the thought that someone would take issue wasn’t there. So yes, that’s something that has changed. I always talk about how portraiture of strangers is epically ethically questionable. Like I said earlier, I’m not on a mission, my only mission is my own little art project (laughter). It’s this self-indulgent little thing, and I’m using people for that. I mean, that bothers me, and it does bother me now that there is more exposure. It doesn’t stop me from doing it. As crimes go, it’s not like robbing a bank, but it’s still nothing I’m proud of. However, I can sometimes over do the kill guilt too. I mean a lot of people love [being the subject of a portrait], the attention, they love the prints, and it can be a happy thing. But the knowledge that it’s going to be potentially out in the world changes things. I take a lot of pictures and I never know which ones are going to be out there. There’s a phenomenon in photography, like in music, where everyone latches on to one song, everyone latches on to one image, and it’s hard to know which one that is going to be. So the Charles phenomenon was peculiar.

It’s been interesting to see the reaction to the interview on the internet and blogs. Alec is clearly an artist that people respect and admire. That’s probably an understatement even. So when he puts his ideas out there through an interview (and previously a blog) you can expect his devotees to hang onto every word. I imagine Alec’s own perspectives and ideologies have a consistently profound impact on other working artists’ own practices. I’ve never really been able to understand this phenomenon, but it becomes even more interesting when Alec says anything even remotely contentious. And anybody following photography understands how conservative the medium is as a whole. Why? Perhaps it’s our unwillingness to fully let go of straight photography’s limitations. Or perhaps that the fine art/commercial/consumer lines don’t exist concretely on the internet.

Take for example the response Rob Haggart’s deceptive selection caused on A Photo Editor.

One commentator’s response reads: “and [sic] the navel gazing continues. Love his work, just don’t know what has happened to the thoughts. From insightful and relevant to ‘me me me’. It reminds me of a certain ‘chattering’ class who proclaim the best films were made in the thirties by directors you have never heard of because, well, you aren’t as interesting as we are. Actually, there seems to be a lot of this going on these days.”

There is actually nothing inherently narcissistic about Alec’s interview. I asked him questions about him and his practice and he responded. The comments on APE suggest that because Soth is feeling a little cynical about photography, art, the world, interacting with people, what have you, that somehow he has abandoned previous integrity. It’s fascinating to observe. In the art world in general, this interview would be considered underwhelming and mild, but in the photo world, suggesting that straight photography was more interesting 50 years ago (when really, it was!) elicits an onslaught of previous fan boy’s abandoning their master.

Either way, it was great talking to someone who I really respect artistically, and on the phone nonetheless! Read the interview and let me know what you think. I think it came out fine, but I could have done a better job directing the flow of the conversation. The most difficult part about interviewing someone (especially someone who has been interviewed many times previously) is getting them to move beyond their go-to responses and expose something interesting and new about their creative process or intellectual development.