They flourished again in the 1930s with work undertaken for the Farm Security Administration, the best and most personalised of which was made by Walker Evans. Then there were the post-war, Guggenheim-funded journeys of Robert Frank (in 1955–6) and Garry Winogrand (1964). Most recently and importantly for Soth are the trips made by Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld. (It was, apparently, a photo of the van that Sternfeld had used on his journeys that first made Soth fall in love with ‘the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things’.) The work produced in this ‘tradition’ has become less rigorously systematic, more personal, more serendipitous over time. In the wake of Frank the idea of the arbitrary became elevated to the level of an organising principle in its own right.
The first picture in Sleeping by the Mississippi is of a snowbound houseboat in Minnesota, with brightly coloured clothes hung out on a line to dry, like prints in a photographer’s studio (see plate 4). In the course of the journey that follows bits and pieces of American photographic history are picked up, taken elsewhere and set down. The accumulated weight of what has gone before obliges Soth to shift sideways, to move forward by drifting laterally. Traces of earlier photographic projects float throughout his work, changed by their journey, but not – as the phrase goes – beyond recognition. Maybe Soth didn’t have Evans or Frank in mind when he photographed Jimmie’s apartment in Memphis, Tennessee (with a hat propped on the edge of a chair), or the Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom in Vicksburg, Mississippi (ditto), but the fact of the matter is that in Evans’ picture of a Negro barber shop in Atlanta (1936) a hat is there, waiting for someone to pick it up. In the syntax of photography this needs to be re-phrased slightly as waiting forsomeone to pick up on it. When Frank photographs a hat on the desk of a bank in Houston, Texas, he is doing just that, tacitly nodding towards Evans – tipping his hat to him, if you will. Like the notes left by Arne Saknussemm in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, these hats indicate both that someone has been here before and show a possible way ahead. Perhaps these hats even served as unconscious triggers, subtly suggesting to Soth that pictures were there for the taking.
It is, in other words, not just a place that Soth is photographing; it’s also, unavoidably, a tradition. A tradition that extends up to the present. That autumnal chair in Sugar’s place, Davenport, Iowa, looks as if it is still warm from – still bears the imprint of – Eggleston’s sitting in it (photographically speaking). It doesn’t matter whether Soth is doing this by design; the point is that there is no getting away from the photographic precedents. (Many of the pictures in Sleeping by the Mississippi have photographs in them; the number of photographs glimpsed in this series of photographs exceeds the number of photographs by Soth.)
Artists have long felt that they are near the end of a tradition, closer to the mouth of the river than its source. Consistent with this, the picture by Soth (born in 1969) of Luxora, Arkansas, is suggestive of a place where the tradition seems to have washed up. Littered with bits and pieces of Americana, it looks like a spot where, over time, all sorts of American photographers have gathered for a picnic and moved on – without bothering to clean up after themselves. (Art history is the opposite of wilderness camping: you’re meant to leave a trace; that’s the point.) It’s in such a mess, this spot, you could be forgiven for thinking it had been left that way deliberately. It looks, that is to say, as if one of the photographers who passed through here might have been Jeff Wall.
This is not the only place where the Canadian makes his presence felt. Soth’s view of brackish waste land in Hickman, Kentucky, is strongly reminiscent of Wall’s ‘The Crooked Path’. In the background of Wall’s picture is the wall of some kind of food manufacturing place. In the background of Soth’s is the river. As the title of Wall’s picture suggests, this otherwise nondescript bit of landscape is identified by the path that leads into it. In Soth there is no path into the picture but, in the background, there is a way out of it: the river, leading on to the next photo – which happens to be of the walls of a room in Missouri, stuck to which is a picture of a river. The sequence, the flow, is all-important. ‘Anyone can take a great picture,’ Soth has said, ‘but very few people can put together a great collection of pictures. This is my goal.’
Beds play an important part in the rhythm and sequencing of Soth’s journey. The penultimate picture in the book is of Venice, Louisiana, ‘the furthest south you can travel the Mississippi by car’. It shows a bed frame choked by the abundance of stuff growing around and through it. The bed itself is sleeping in a bed of leaves, of grass. Soth notes that places like this may disappear as, each year, parts of the coast of Louisiana vanish into the Gulf of Mexico. The possibility that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this fear may already have been realised simultaneously raises the value of his work as documentary record (preserving evidence of what was once here) and as its lyrical complement, the reverie (an evocation of something intangible, subjective). ‘We all have a memory of life that goes on behind our eyes,’ said Frank. ‘Since 1974, in my latest photos, I have actually tried to show what was going on behind my eyes.’ Soth’s title also urges us towards a sense of slumbering subjectivity. These are images not just of places at a particular time, but of a kind of documentary dream-time.
This combination of the oneiric and objective detachment is susceptible, in part, to technical explanation. The cameras used by Frank and Winogrand were so light that they were able to snap pictures as they drove, without stopping. This was a great liberation but ease generated a certain profligacy. Stephen Shore remembers that when he made the trip that resulted in American Surfaces he ended up photographing everything. Moving to a large-format camera forced him to slow down. Sternfeld – who was one of Soth’s teachers – also felt the same. The large-format camera imposes a patience of composition and selectivity that is in keeping with the slow drift of a river. Whereas Frank snatched instants from the rush of time the view camera enfolds itself around a moment. In the course of a discursive trip down another river – the Danube – Claudio Magris remarks that ‘Squalor has a mysterious majesty of its own.’ The density of information of the large-format negative bathes squalor in its own peculiar majesty; it also lends a hallucinatory or dream-like quality to the most humdrum situation.
Soth’s work lacks the gleaming, pristine quality that Brodsky associates with the Neva because the river and the tradition of which it is, in this context, a physical manifestation have been around so long. Like many great rivers the Mississippi is no longer in any hurry to get to the sea (why bother? It’s seen it all before); cauterised by its own weight, the river drags its huge memorybelly along like a weary earth-coloured snake. It is too laden with history, with images. What it longs for more than anything, in fact, is to rest. After all this time it can get to the Gulf of Mexico in its sleep.
2006
I first came across Michael Ackerman’s photographs in a cinema in 1999. My then girlfriend and I were waiting for the film to start when she pulled out a copy of The New Yorker that featured a collage of half a dozen black-and-white pictures of a woman. In five of the six pictures she is in a cramped apartment, naked or in the process of getting dressed, cleaning her teeth, sitting on the toilet; one shows her dressed and out on the street. In the darkness of the cinema it was impossible to see the pictures properly, and I spent the next two hours impatiently waiting for the film to end so I could see this other movie – a whole film in just six frames! – clearly. Even in bright daylight this turned out to be impossible. That, it became clear, when I got to know Ackerman’s work better, is the point. By his standards, in fact, these images were razor-sharp. A caption explained that the six photos comprised a detail from a series called Paris, France, 1999. The pictures were subtly erotic, incredibly intimate and, as can happen when you are exposed to certain works of art, I felt as if something in me had been waiting for them. It was like falling in love.
No,
