How to Revisit an Iconic Photograph - An Interview with Alec Soth
SB: The issue of copying can be kind of touchy among photographers. Did you have any qualms about exploring these iconic images so directly?
AS: I really didn’t have any qualms about this. Photography is a language. And in order to speak the language, you need to learn about how other people use it. I know that there have been a number of controversies about photographers copying each other. But this was an educational experiment. And it was fruitful. As they say: Good artists borrow, great artists steal.
SB: You mentioned to me a little while ago that you had sort of fallen back in love with photography. I’m curious how you fell out of love and then back in love with it.
AS: For a little while I was exhausted. Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr and so on. … I felt like I was drowning in images. As a consequence, even work outside of that digital stream – the work I was seeing in books and exhibitions – started looking all of the same. More important, my own pictures started feeling the same. I was burned out. So I started experimenting. I made little videos and used disposable cameras. I played. I stopped making big, formal, large-format pictures.
Recently I’ve returned to a version of that more formal kind of photography, but I have a whole new energy behind it. I’m making pictures that surprise me. I’m feeling some of that same thrill when I was 20 and falling in love with the medium.
The advent of blogs and Facebook has changed the way we show photography
…and has changed what we want to see. Here at my studio, we are trying to create a printed portfolio that feels more like the looseness of a blog and has the personality that can come thru on facebook. This casual tossing out of idea and photographs that blogs and facebook allow us are starting to be expected and hungered for…and I do really find that exciting.
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Some Advice, Vegetarian Photography
For a year and a half now I have been Vegan, or Vegan in almost every aspect of my life. The one thing I haven’t changed is shooting photographic film (of course film is gelatin based and therefore I hasten to call myself Vegan or even Vegetarian; I cannot be while I still consume any sort of animal product). I had perhaps accepted the fact that I could make every effort in every other aspect of my life to be Vegan, other than with my photographic ‘work’ and simply accept that I am not actually Vegetarian or Vegan because of this. Recently I have begun to doubt whether I can do this, whether I should or can shoot film? Should I move to an entirely digital work output, as the option is there, and eliminate this final animal product from my daily life? I would appreciate any opinions, feelings, ideas etc in response?
