Latest Alec Soth Quotes from Interviews

• 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 Soth

  Book, Home, Perfect

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've never been the type of photographer to live with people I photograph. You know, shoot heroin with them, that kind of thing. I respect those photographers that work that way. But part of my personality is a certain amount of distance, and part of my attraction to the medium of photography is this distance where you're in the world, but you're removed from it.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Distance, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I admire photographers that don't need a destination. In some ways, street photography is like that. There's a quality of wanderlust for sure in my work, but I need a destination.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Quality, Photographer

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• You can photograph anything. You can be inside, outside, doesn't matter, you're controlling the light. It gives you great flexibility. That was a primary motivation.

  Alec Soth

  Motivation, Giving, Photograph

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Every 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 Soth

  Photography, Black And White, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• People can talk about the death of social life or whatever; it's not necessarily how I see it. It's more musical in the sense, where it's a feeling about the place I live, slash, who I am in the place.

  Alec Soth

  People, Feelings, Musical

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Growth, Growing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Different, Journalism

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm like the annoying guy in the street.

  Alec Soth

  Guy, Annoying, Streets

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

  Alec Soth

  People, Want, Truth Is

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

  Alec Soth

  People, Needs, Want

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

  Alec Soth

  Book, Thinking, Narrative

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience.

  Alec Soth

  Artist, People, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language.

  Alec Soth

  Daughter, Memories, World

  Source: www.pbs.org