Using free association to reinvigorate the world of photography

In a world inundated by images, photographer Alec Soth seeks to give the saturated medium of photography new life.

A crowd of nearly 200 people gathered in Meyerson room B1 yesterday evening for a lecture sponsored by the Penn School of Design. The speaker, world-class photographer Soth, attracted an audience mostly made up of graduate students studying the visual arts and some undergraduates.

Soth began his talk with the observation that Flickr - a photography Web site - currently contains over two billion uploaded images. As a professional photographer, Soth said he "felt the burden of these billions of images weighing down" on him, and asked what more could be photographed that hadn't been done already.

His answer, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," is Soth's first comprehensive photography project. The work is a compilation of photographs Soth took on a road trip along the full length of the Mississippi River.

Soth explained that the work is founded on the concept of associative thinking - whereby he photographs images with seemingly unrelated motifs in the hopes that his audience will create their own individual connections within the work.

He analogizes this phenomenon to "surfing the web in the real world."

For example, Soth presented two separate photographs as one set: one of a child holding an egg, and another of a body builder eating an egg.

Given the caliber of his images, this concept is a brazen response to the question of what one more image will do that two billion others have not - force us to look at the world around us and see things which we would otherwise overlook.

Soth describes this concept of free association as an attempt to "connect the dots" as he "moves through space." His photographs aim to give a logical trajectory to seemingly random shards of reality.

Common to the majority of Soth's images is a cinematic feel that hints at deeper stories behind the people he photographs. Indeed, Wharton sophomore Chris Chomiak observed "a mysterious and intriguing quality behind Soth's images."

College sophomore Daniel Santos echoed this sentiment, saying that Soth's work "made me really wonder the story behind his subjects."

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