Coinciding with the release of his new book, I know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, Alec Soth will be opening five concurrent exhibitions of the work in Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. The exhibitions mark a shift towards a stripped down, connection-driven approach to photography that Soth began exploring during his 2017 FraenkelLAB residency.
Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” the project investigates the possibilities and limitations of what photographs can convey about the inner lives of their subjects. Often the result of extended engagements with the people he photographs, the large-scale portraits and interiors were made in the U.S. and Europe, and often depict artists, writers and choreographers, among others. Intimate and quiet, the images reveal something otherwise unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. Soth commented:
“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.
When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.
In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.”
I know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating opens in Minneapolis at Weinstein Hammons Gallery on March 15th, in New York at Sean Kelly Gallery on March 21st, in San Francisco at Fraenkel Gallery on March 23rd, and in Berlin at Loock Gallery on March 29th.
