Welcome to this edition of Photography Stories. Today, we look at the story behind the photograph Alec Soth made in Hartford, Connecticut in 2022–2024. We’d love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist’s work.
(This is the story behind the photograph, in the photographer’s own words.)
Alec Soth spent about an hour and a half on a self-portrait that was meant to look like an accident.
Between 2022 and 2024, Soth visited 25 undergraduate art programs across the United States for his book Advice for Young Artists. This picture was made somewhere else. Every year he teaches at a graduate photography program in Hartford, Connecticut. It is a limited residency program, so many of the students are older, and they are already advanced photographers.
During one of those stays, Soth wanted time for his own project. He found an empty classroom and began to experiment with self-portraits, something he had not done much before.
“I’m really interested in those accidental self-portraits,” he says. “But this one is not accidental. I worked so hard to make this picture. I probably spent an hour and a half on it.”
In the finished photograph, Soth’s face fills the left side of the frame, soft and out of focus. Behind him, a white plaster bust stands sharp on a paint-stained table. The window above it shows bare trees and a grey sky.
He worked digitally, with a Fuji GFX on a tripod, and controlled the camera from an app on his phone. Small details kept him there.
“It didn’t just happen. There were different elements that I came to enjoy, like the marbled blue on the table next to the blue of my shirt. I was trying to get the light right so that I could still see the cloudy sky outside.”
The light came from a single flash on the camera. Soth was much closer to it than the room behind him, so he had to find a way to bring up the background and not himself.
Then one of his graduate students walked in and started to watch.
“I did not want him there. I was immersed, I was having fun figuring this out, and he started watching me. I was also embarrassed, because what I was doing was ridiculous. I was staging an accidental picture for an hour and a half.”
On his visits to other schools, this had not happened. “They didn’t know who I was, and people just left me alone.”
Soth says the habits of large format photography still guided him. With an 8x10 camera, a photographer often walks through a place without the camera first and composes the picture in his head.
“Even though I have the phone and I can see the picture, I’m pre-visualizing how I can bring up the shadows, bring down the highlights and make the composition work. What I learned from large format photography, I apply in what looks like an accidental picture.”
The same experience shaped the shallow depth of field and the crop. The camera records more than the four by five frame he sees on the screen, and he has changed his crops later before.
“There are no rules,” he says.
Soth talks more about the book, digital photography and freedom in our interview about Advice for Young Artists.
More stories:
Sometimes the best project begins when the first idea fails. You arrive with a plan, but what you find does not fit it. Story Behind The Photograph