shots, notes and stray thoughts

this post will kick off a new thing on this blog. occasionally, i’ll be making posts on photographers who inspire me. i generally find great inspiration among my friends, but they already have their own category, so this is going to be the kind of people who’s work i regularly check out to get new ideas or just to appreciated the slight pain i get, when my jaw drops to the floor.

i’ll start out with a guy i started getting interested in back when i studied at fatamorgana in copenhagen. in 2003, alec soth made a book called sleeping by the mississippi. it consisted of images taken with his large format camera while driving along the mississippi river. a combination of portraits and still life, he manages to capture the spirit of the river and the people who live and work along it in a very elegant way.

his next book, niagara, was centered on the town near the waterfalls, where people go to celebrate their honeymoon. it’s slightly darker and more moody, which i really like. i read somewhere, that he intended to dedicate the book to his wife, but it became so dark and depressing, that he decided that he better not.

looking closer at soth’s work made me realize that there’s a point to me made about working slowly. he has to, due to his large and complicated camera, but it works to his advantage. the whole process is so slow, that people will start to relax or at least put down their guards.

it was inspiration from alec soth that made me shoot my first year assignment on my grand dad’s old rolleiflex. i still consider these images some of the best i’ve produced.

when i sometimes think about how to combine storytelling based in “the real world” with a more artsy touch, soth always comes to mind. especially, i like how he includes notes in his books. notes that will bring some context to the picture. something, that in my opinion adds a who new layer to work.

© alec soth – lifted from his website

the note to this image reads as follows:
Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota
During the slow process of setting up the 8×10 camera, I would sometimes ask people I photographed to write down their dreams. “My dream is running water,” wrote Peter, who has lived on a Mississippi River houseboat for over twenty years.

that, to me, is the perfect example of how the process and the result works together.

here’s a clip from youtube where he talks about how he works…

and this one is a presentation of his niagra work from magnum in motion: