Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present A Pound of Pictures, a new body of work by Alec Soth. In photographs made on a series of road trips across the U.S., Soth records people and locations with subtle connections. The series features images that reference photography itself, investigating the physicality of the medium and its limited ability to preserve what is fleeting. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph published by MACK, and will have concurrent presentations at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, and Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis. Fraenkel Gallery will host a ticketed opening reception with the artist on Saturday, February 5, from 1-4pm.
Soth’s subjects include Niagara Falls tourists, Fire Island beachgoers, lush wildflowers, and piles of photographs—the title of the series was inspired by a person Soth met who sold photographs by weight. Soth began the series as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, but later decided to widen his approach. Using his camera as an “excuse to wander and dig,” Soth follows his intuitive attention, returning to places he visited for past projects and exploring new subjects. He writes that beyond their surface, the photographs are largely about “the process of their own making. They are about going into the ecstatically specific world and creating a connection between the ephemeral (light, time) and the physical (eyeballs, film). These accumulated connections hopefully create constellations of possible meaning.”