Alec Soth in Park Rapids

The Nemeth Art Center is located on the second floor of an old government building—maybe a courthouse?—with dim lighting, blue-green plaster walls, and oak woodwork all around. A quilt hangs from one wall in the lobby above a scale model of the building itself, with an old (but fancy) dress hanging from a manikin nearby. It was as if we were entering an enormous historical museum cum B&B.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which houses the art galleries. The words “Alec Soth, Paris / Minnesota” had been painted in an elegant font on the glass transom above the double doors into the large open gallery space, though which we could see a few very large photographs and also two or three long tables around which little kids were crowded, engaged in some sort of craft project.

A quick glance at a few of the photos reinforced the opinion I had already formed of Soth’s work. The quotidian subject matter and the superb handling of light and color drew me in; but as I looked, I felt my interest fading into a kind of cold admiration and a puzzling disappointment.

I know very little about photography as an art-form, and I’m halfway toward agreeing with the viewer whom you sometimes overhear at a show mumbling, “My daughter takes better pictures than this.” But every famous photographer has his or her signature tone. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s warmth and humanity, Garry Windogrand’s exuberant and chaotic street-formlessness, Diane Arbus’s weirdness, and so on. Alec Soth doesn’t probe his subjects; he forces than into our faces with a flat, visual uniformity that’s almost uncanny, and is usually less about them—the subjects—than it is about the distress of taking a photograph without succumbing to the “picturesque.” Comparing his work with the images in a volume like Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light, one of my favorites, may be taken as an example of a photographer whose work can be formally and tonally astute, rich in atmosphere, and unafraid to include images of people having fun together.

On the far wall an array of smaller images had been arranged in a square. I was going to take a picture of it—I didn’t see a sign saying you couldn’t—but then I saw a young woman standing nearby with a camera, and I said, “Are you taking pictures?”

“I’m Tessa Beck, the museum director,” she said. “I was doing some video of this textile workshop.” And she came over to talk. She had a friendly smile, and wore a bright blue and white checkered blouse that almost matched her eyes. 

“Are you familiar with Soth’s work?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I like it. We saw a show at the Weinstein in Minneapolis a few years ago ... and then there’s the Mississippi series.”

“Well, this show predates those,” she jumped right in. “Alec went to Paris to shoot a fashion show, mostly back stage. Then it occurred to him to come back here to photograph the style of people in this area. Everyone has a style of dress, don’t you think?” I looked at the bright blue squares on her blouse, which were actually shaped like small, bent, stove-pipe hats. Then she started talking about something called “W.” I’d never heard of it. A fashion magazine? She spoke rapidly, interjecting “like” and other place-holder phrases liberally here and there, like young people often do, and for a while I lost the thread. She was enthusiastic and obviously very bright.

“Are you from around here?” I asked, changing the subject slightly.

“I’m from the Fargo area, but my family has a cabin on Bad Medicine.”

“Fargo’s getting to be pretty hip,” I said. “Especially along Broadway.”

“Yeah, and they have that new hotel.”

“The Donaldson?” Hilary and I explored the lobby ten years ago.

“No. Now they’ve got the Jasper,” Tessa updated me. Then, hardly stopping for breath, she pointed at the array of photos on the wall and said, “These pictures were in a box.”

She used a photographic term for them that I’d never heard before, describing them as part of the process but not intended for exhibit, the rejects from an oversized contact sheet. “Alec said, ‘If you want to frame them, you can use them.’ Most of them have never been seen before.”

Tessa was excited about that.

“Do you get to keep them?” I asked, naively.

She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Dream on.”

Hilary said, “Where are the photos from Paris?”

“We decided to omit them from the show, so we could add more of the images from this part of the world.”

“Hmm. Interesting.”

Tessa let us go, having enriched our visit immeasurably,  and returned to her textile workshop. We wandered the floor for fifteen minutes. Many of the images were of teenagers at a dance. Formal poses. Lots of seemingly blank faces and empty space all around. But was there more?

The most memorable image, I think, was of an adolescent girl wearing a pink coat and a crocheted stocking cap: colorful, wistful, enigmatic, slightly wary, bordering on the sentimental but not quite tumbling in. Perhaps the photo nearby of the adolescent male looking out through a gray window showed us the same world, but from the opposite point of view.

It would have been interesting to see the photos from Paris, too. But perhaps the division between haute couture and backwoods “whatever” would have been too obvious. Yet wasn’t that what Soth himself was driving at? Maybe. Maybe not.

Poking around online when we got home, I discovered that “W” refers to a book disguised as a fashion magazine that Soth put together for Magnum Photos. I located it in the library catalog and requested a copy; it arrived a few days later. Running along the top of the front cover, in thick black capital letters, are the words “Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth,” but on the center of the cover, in larger letters, it says “Paris Minnesota.” A library cataloger’s nightmare, but a postmodernist’s dream, I guess. It’s a complex, multi-layered work, loaded not only with formal and casual photos but also with articles that a fashion magazine might run. Are they for real? I’m not sure I could tell the difference, and I didn’t take the time to check. But the curators in Park Rapids were wise, I think, to limit their focus to images taken nearby.

I'm reluctant to look too deeply into W or other secondary materials. Often that ancillary verbiage, which tells you what you're looking at, or how you should be looking at it, is doing the work the art itself is supposed to do, while obscuring its intrinsic value intuitively considered. 

But I'm warming to Soth's work, almost in spite of myself.