I've never been the type of photographer to live with people I photograph. You know, shoot heroin with them, that kind of thing. I respect those photographers that work that way. But part of my personality is a certain amount of distance, and part of my attraction to the medium of photography is this distance where you're in the world, but you're removed from it.

Alec Soth

Categorized in : People Photography Distance

If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.

creativity careers inspirational

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

wandering-around falling-in-love photography

Every once in a while I have this revelation like, "Wow, a hundred years ago the world wasn't black and white." It was in color. Photographed in a certain way, people look from another time. We are just not used to seeing ourselves in that context. Something that's fascinating about photography is you can isolate a moment, tear it out of its context, and see it afresh. Another realization is that, "Wow, there's a big world out there, and people are still doing all sorts of the things that they used to do." We don't just live in iPad land.

black-and-white photography people

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

cousin photography imagination

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

truth-is want people

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

related photography way

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

narrative book thinking

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.

lonely photography beautiful

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.

journalism different photography

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding... by Alec Soth

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

findings photography discovery

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people. by Alec Soth

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

want people needs

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

subjects photography way

Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.

mirrors photography reflection

This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

technology typewriters photography

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life. by Alec Soth

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.

photography real-life real

It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a compl... by Alec Soth

It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a complete mystery to me.

combination mystery

Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling.

growing growth photography

In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?

photograph looks world

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable... by Alec Soth

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

technology typewriters needs

I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers.

mystery stranger people