Artworks

Alec Soth

American, b. 1969

Keni, New Orleans, 2018

Archival pigment print

50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm)

© Alec Soth
Courtesy: the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund, 2019

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth won acclaim in 2004 with his self-published book of photographs, Sleeping by the Mississippi. For that project, he traveled by road along the length of the Mississippi River, photographing the landscape and people he met in towns large and small, in his own words, “using the river as a route to connect with people along the way.”

For his latest project, I know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (which takes its name from the Wallace Stevens poem Gray Room) Soth expanded his geographic reach across the United States and Europe, but limited himself to photographing indoors, taking portraits of people in their own homes, exploring how private settings might allude to the inscrutable interior life of his subjects.

In his travels, he identified his sitters by asking locals to recommend people they knew who “know how to inhabit space.” This particular example, which shows Soth once again working along the Mississippi, has become a signature image of the project.