I find myself using music metaphors all the time, but this is too perfect, I feel like. Digital downloading is like photographs online. It's great, they're available, you can see lots of different work, but it's a limited experience of the form. A book is like an album. You don't have to have a million dollars to be able to buy it, you have to save some money, you have to buy your album, then you take it home, and you put it on your turntable.
Alec SothEvery once in a while I have this revelation like, "Wow, a hundred years ago the world wasn't black and white." It was in color. Photographed in a certain way, people look from another time. We are just not used to seeing ourselves in that context. Something that's fascinating about photography is you can isolate a moment, tear it out of its context, and see it afresh. Another realization is that, "Wow, there's a big world out there, and people are still doing all sorts of the things that they used to do." We don't just live in iPad land.
Alec SothI'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.
Alec SothFor me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.
Alec SothIn assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest.
Alec Soth