Alec Soth »

Gathered Leaves

3 May – 24 July 2022

Book Launch and Signing with Alec Soth: 2 & 3 May, 7-8pm
Free admission. Access only with personal online ticket and FFP2 mask.
Registration here

Kunstfoyer

Maximilianstr. 53, 80530 Munich
T +49 (0)89-2160 2244
kunstfoyer@vkb.de
www.versicherungskammer-kulturstiftung.de
daily 9:30am - 6:45pm

CANADA. 2004. Two towels
© Alec Soth / Magnum Photos

The exhibition surveys two decades of work by acclaimed photographer Alec Soth (born 1969). It brings together five of his major works – Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2014) and the most recent, A Pound of Pictures (2022).

King & Sheridan, Tulsa, Oklahoma
© Alec Soth / Magnum Photos

Soth is a fine artist, a Magnum photojournalist, a blogger, a self-publisher, an Instagrammer, an educator. He explores the many different forms photography takes in the world, and works to create different types of encounter with his audiences: from museum shows to live workshops conducted from his Winnebago. This exhibition is conceived to reflect the evolution of Soth’s individual series as they have moved from the page of the maquette or book to the wall of the gallery. A lyrical documentary photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, Soth regards himself first and foremost as an American photographer. His country’s physical landscapes – the majestic Mississippi, the thundering Niagara Falls, the wide open deserts and wildernesses, the small towns and suburbs – have provided the structure and setting for his poetic surveys of American life.

CANADA. 2005. Rebecca
© Alec Soth / Magnum Photos

The exhibition title, Gathered Leaves, refers on one level to photography simply as sheets of paper brought together. It is also a line taken from that quintessentially American epic, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855). Whitman’s poem catalogued the diversity of the nation on the eve of the Civil War. Soth’s America, in the early 21st century, is also described in a time of tension, as the nation wrestles its conflicting desires for individualism and community.

Alec Soth: Gathered Leaves Annotated
Paperback with fold-out map jacket
Printed on newspaper
21.5 x 26 cm, 720 pages
ISBN 978-1-913620-78-3
€55

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Alec Soth. Gathered Leaves Annotated, published by MACK, 55€.

Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist.

Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the 'third coast' of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.

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