Alec Soth's Creative Process

We watched Alec Soth’s 2010 documentary “Somewhere to Disappear” in class. The documentary follows Soth (b. 1969) during his project Broken Manual which explores the desire to just disappear. For the project Soth searched for people living on the margins of the society.

In the documentary Soth admitted that to him working on this kind of project sometimes feels sort of uncomfortable and even voyeuristic. He also points out the concern of taking advantage of people. As the documentary goes on his creative process starts to reveal, and we see how often one photo leads to another one sometimes even taking a completely different direction. This is what he calls transforming the ideas in his head into a “path through the world”.

Minnesota, USA. 2007. © Alec Soth / Magnum Photos

There is a scene where Soth is driving around and sees an interesting looking house. He simply states “that is a picture”, gets out of the car and goes to investigate. He also moves around the furniture in between the photos showing us he clearly got some kind of vision as soon as he saw the inside of the house.

"You're not gonna have an incredible experience every time you take a photo so you just keep taking them and every once in a while it happens" - Soth in Somewhere to Disappear

In an interview with Lensculture Soth mentions how he used to think storytelling was the most powerful tool for expression and therefore growing frustrated with photography’s limitations. However, he says, these days he is mostly interested in “simply paying attention”. He also gives advice on dealing with the gap between your mind’s eye and what your hands can produce reminding photographers to try and “enjoy the process, struggle or not”.