Looking for Love and a best friend
by Alec Soth
The Great Northern invited photographer and Festival alum Alec Soth to reflect on his favorite winter photo and why winter in Minnesota is one of his favorite times to shoot.
I was a sad sack in the mid-nineties. I hated my job and the idea of ever making it as a working artist was inconceivable. But I kept trudging along with my photography. Every weekend I would get into my beat-up minivan, pop in a slowcore CD, and prowl the Twin Cities looking for pictures. Winter was my favorite time to shoot. The severity of the landscape matched my mood while also prompting nostalgic feelings for the comforts of childhood.
Having grown up in exurban Chanhassen (my biggest claim to fame is that Prince lived down the road), I was drawn to similar places on my photo hunts. One day while trolling the no-man’s-land between St. Paul and Woodbury, I came across a handmade billboard in someone’s freeway-facing back yard. Even in the pre-Internet era, there was something achingly futile about this fellow’s quest for companionship.
I’ll never know if this man found happiness, but then I never could have predicted the life ahead of me. I’ve been lucky enough to live my dream for a couple of decades, but I still like to drive around in the winter while listening to sad songs to get my creative juices flowing.
Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), and A Pound of Pictures (2022). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.