1. Alec Soth was born on 1969 and is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis.
20 Facts About Alec Soth
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Alec Soth's work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth.
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Alec Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom.
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Alec Soth has received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, and in 2021 received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
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Alec Soth's photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center.
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Alec Soth's work has been exhibited widely including as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a major solo exhibition at Media Space in London in 2015.
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Alec Soth studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
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Alec Soth was reported to be "painfully shy" in his youth.
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Alec Soth traveled around the Mississippi River and made a self-printed book entitled Sleeping by the Mississippi which included both landscapes and portraits.
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Alec Soth's work has since been compared to that of Walker Evans and Stephen Shore.
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Alec Soth has photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek.
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Alec Soth tries to find a "narrative arc and true storytelling" and pictures in which each picture will lead to the next one.
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Alec Soth has been photographing different parts of the US since his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004.
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Alec Soth spent the years between 2006 and 2010 exploring the idea of retreat.
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Alec Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization, he photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways.
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Alec Soth concurrently produced the photo book From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, an overview of Soth's photography from the early 1990s to the present.
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In 2010, Alec Soth flew to the United Kingdom but despite not having applied for a work visa was allowed into the country on the understanding that if he was "caught taking photographs" he could be put in prison for two years.
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In 2010, Alec Soth founded the publishing house, Little Brown Mushroom.
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Alec Soth has collaborated on numerous books with Brad Zellar, a Minnesota writer from the Twin Cities.
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In 2004, Alec Soth became a nominee of the Magnum Photos agency and in 2008 became a full member.