An encounter with Alec Soth

Until August 10th, the first photograph you’ll see when you walk into the U.S. Bank Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is an odd portrait of my friend Charles Erie. He is wearing what appears to be a flight suit and holding two model airplanes. His dark Norwegian face is set behind old glasses and a bushy beard.

Essay: An encounter with Alec Soth

The photograph was taken by Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth (rhymes with “both”) in 2002 for his first book of portraits, Sleeping by the Mississippi. Many of these photographs of eccentric folks are now on display at the MIA in an exhibition called Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi. Erie’s picture is the most prominent portrait and is the cover photo on one of the book’s recent editions. The portrait became art-world famous after appearing on promotional posters for the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York and after The New York Times and Time Magazine compared Soth’s work to famous photographers like Robert Frank and Walker Evans. With the Star Tribune calling Soth “the hottest artist in recent memory to call Minnesota home,” the photos from Sleeping have been bought and are reportedly valued at $700,000.

Erie says he was returning home from a masonry job on a cold spring day when he found Soth talking to his wife Martha outside their house near Vasa, Minnesota. Soth introduced himself as a photographer and asked if he could take Erie’s picture on the flat part of the house’s roof. Erie was wearing his normal cold-weather working garb: a light-colored ski mask, gloves, boots, and an old, one-piece parachuter’s jumpsuit stained with paint and mortar.

As the two lugged Soth’s old-fashioned 8X10-inch camera up to the roof, Soth noticed the array of model airplanes hanging in Erie’s glassed-in lookout room at the top of the house. He selected one of the planes and asked if Erie would hold it in the portrait. Erie said that would be fine, but insisted that he had much more interesting planes. Erie selected two others—aware at the time, he says, that they would spark memories of 9/11, which was then just a few months past. He posed holding both planes, his chiseled face looking solemn.

“This one’s going places,” Soth said after he took the picture and came from behind the camera’s hood.

“Okay,” Erie replied. “Cool.”

Before Soth left, Erie made two requirements for the possible publication of the photo. First, he asked that he be sent the proofs of the picture; and second, that his name and where he lived not be mentioned. Eventually the proofs did come, and the portrait was published simply as “Charles, Vasa, Minnesota.”

All the pictures in Soth’s exhibition are beautiful and captivating. Like Erie, many of the photographs’ subjects stir emotions in the viewer. Among those emotions—as placards in the gallery note—is empathy for the subjects. Sometimes you feel like you shouldn’t be looking at them. The portraits feel both exploitative and exhilarating. Looking at Erie’s picture as you enter the gallery is like looking at an old sepia-tone photography of an American Indian posing on a horse. You are drawn to him and, at the same time, you feel as if his soul was stolen.

In 1936, Walker Evans and writer James Agee went to live with three Alabama sharecropper families and document their realities in the midst of the Depression. Evans said he wanted his photographs to be “literate, authoritative, and transcendent.” His process was slow as he patiently watched and got to know the families. He stayed with them for eight months, taking dozens of shots until he was satisfied that he had captured his subjects. His familiarity with his subjects comes through in the photographs. They are remarkable both for their unflinching look at the families’ poverty and for the sense of dignity they convey.

Soth’s method in taking Erie’s picture and the portraits in Sleeping was purposefully less intimate. He writes in the acknowledgements to his book, “There is no greater joy than wide-eyed wandering.” Traveling by car along the Mississippi, he described his work as a documentary of “encounters with strangers.” He said he hopes his work will inspire his viewers to have their own encounters with strangers. “I want to sort of encourage that idea,” Soth said once, “that you can live an interesting life, you can have interesting experiences.”

The photographs demonstrate Soth’s talent for finding intriguing people and places. His eye for color and geometry makes his portraits strikingly beautiful. But you also feel in them the brevity of the encounters with his subjects. The portraits are dangerously close to being the fruit of merely “interesting experiences.” Walker Evans spent so much time in Alabama because he knew the difficulty of representing marginalized people. There’s a thin line between a photograph saying, “Here is an interesting person” and one saying, “Here is a freak.”

While Erie has had some fun with his famous picture, he feels queasy about his image circulating the globe and strangers making assumptions about him. He says he doesn’t mind being the eccentric guy around his neighborhood, but he doesn’t like the idea of strangers making him out to be more of a “goofball” than he thinks he is.

Like Native Americans and the Amish, he’ll be very suspicious the next time a photographer drives up to the house. Crazy Horse, who allegedly never allowed his picture to be taken, once explained this mistrust by saying, “My friend, why should you wish me to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?”

Daniel Miller is a freelance writer and a cook on the West Bank. He lives in the Seward neighborhood.

Cover image from Sleeping by the Mississippi ©2004 Steidl.