Things That Are More Than One Thing: on Alec Soth’s Photography
He liked to imagine that the world was providing him with signs. He didn’t believe it, but it was fun. If you worked that way, treating whatever came into view as the next point in some emerging constellation, more seemed possible. His goal in taking photographs was, in a sense, to give himself the slip, so as to rediscover the actual, populated-with-surprises world. This little game helped with that.
Taped to his steering wheel was a hand-scrawled list of things to look for as he drove around. The list changed over time — he would add an item, cross something else out. For a while it read:
Humble flowers
Gazing balls
Cemeteries (photos on headstones)
Boxes/briefcases
Buddha
Car interiors (sleepers)
Binoculars/birding
Waterskiing
Ponds
Footpaths
Shoveling!
Easels
*
In one of the photographs in Alec Soth’s A Pound of Pictures,[1] a young man — he looks eighteen or nineteen — stands alone in a white patch of dandelions (fig. 1). His head is turned away from the camera, his mop of curly brown hair glowing in the sunlight. The pink handle of a butterfly net rests on his shoulder. He has been searching for something—butterflies, presumably — and now, perhaps, he has found one. He stares down into the tangle of flowers, still unsure what he sees.
His name is Alejandro; he’s Soth’s intern. Soth took the picture at Jayne’s Hill, the highest point on Long Island, after he and Alejandro visited the Walt Whitman Birthplace Museum, a four-minute drive away. Whitman used to walk up Jayne’s Hill when he was young, and the butterfly net, purchased by Soth at the museum’s gift shop, is a nod to one small facet of the poet’s elaborately fabricated mystique. In a famous portrait, Whitman sits in profile, a butterfly perched on his index finger. His face looks masklike, even more so than the subjects of other portraits from the nineteenth century. The hand without the butterfly is tucked loosely into the pocket of his thick cardigan. He wears a long, wild Santa Claus beard.
Whitman claimed that butterflies, as well as birds and “other wild critters,” were drawn to him. When he held out his finger, he said, they would fly over to him.[2] But the butterfly in the portrait is fake, a cardboard novelty.[3]
If you’ve ever studied Whitman in an English class, there’s a good chance you already know this story. It’s funny, ridiculous. But it also reflects an impulse at the core of his poetry. “Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?” Whitman asks early in “Song of Myself.” “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” [4] He is a kind of alchemist, or maybe just an illusionist, who intends for his poems to function as affirmation machines: menaced by disaster, particularly the catastrophe of the Civil War, but finally dedicated to converting all loss into gain. Whitman himself puts the point even more strongly. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,” he writes, “And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”[5] In other words, what seems like loss never actually is.
A Pound of Pictures, assembled during a series of road trips around the United States between 2018 and 2021, is filled with allusions to Whitman. He is Soth’s lodestar, which makes a kind of desperate sense. The country that Soth was photographing during these years often seemed pretty much fucked, and if you want to counteract a sensation of doom, maybe Whitman is your guy. Ultimately, though, the work that Soth produced strikes me as wonderfully unlike Whitman, who is forever drawing the same alienating conclusion: anyone inclined to experience despair is (utterly, gloriously) wrong.
It’s as if Soth has found a way to “ordain [himself],” as Whitman puts it in “Song of the Open Road,” “loos’d of limits and imaginary lines”[6] without taking up any of Whitman’s hellbent triumphalism — not to mention his racism,[7]or his fervid, self-justifying faith in the goodness of America. When I read Whitman’s poems today, I find them strenuous, awesome but empty. By contrast, Soth’s photos seem full of an auspicious, wondering doubt.
*
In another photograph, in Tulsa now, a woman kneels on the sidewalk at the intersection of King and Sheridan Streets (fig. 2). It’s the middle of the day, or maybe early afternoon, and the light looks like what you see, in C.S. Giscombe words, “in the hour before a thunderstorm: dull, bitter light, and everywhere / though without apparent source.”[8] It’s just the smog, I think, which is so thick that the sky, crisscrossed with powerlines, is the color of skim milk.
Across the street are a couple of low-flung beige storefronts: a carpet store, some kind of clinic. Maybe they’re just closed for the day, though something tells me they’re no longer in operation. The sidewalk is empty of anyone other than the woman but is cluttered with stuff. She sits before a row of bouquets laid out on the cement, her back turned to a jumbled pile of old shoes.
[left: Alec Soth] I’ve never stood at this particular intersection, but most of the American places I’ve lived have looked something like this: cheaply built up and rundown; merely functional, except nothing really works anymore. Still, I would never describe the scene as familiar. Robert Adams has taken many pictures of smog-streaked places, but those photographs tend to be chastisements, documents of landscapes defaced and therefore squandered by ways of American life. Soth’s photo is more difficult to pin down. He photographs the woman from enough of a distance that she looks small, her legs folded beneath her, half-smiling, half-grimacing at the bouquet that she holds. The flowers are white roses, maybe; it’s hard to say. Really, the entire photograph lacks sharp legibility, even as the clarity of its details gives it an almost bewildering quality of depth. (Only now, squinting, do I see that the tattoo on her arm is of a baby’s footprints, over which arch the words “In Memory Of.”)
We speak of pictures as capturing scenes, but here that word seems inaccurate. It’s so definitive, and nothing about this photo is fixed. What has happened to this woman? What has she spent her life doing? How did she come to sit here? And where is she, really — what is this peculiar way of laying out streets, of organizing life?
“Bless all things that are more than one thing,” Robert Pinsky writes. “And all people / For our unwitting and witting witless improvised mixtures.” [9] The photograph preserves the more-than-oneness of this moment in Oklahoma, in all of its luminous, unrecoverable specificity.
*
After that day in Long Island, he added butterflies to his list. But serendipity kept failing him: he wasn’t finding much of anything. In Philadelphia, he finally looked up one of those places where you can go see butterflies.
It wasn’t some extravagant observatory. There was a middle-school science-fair feel to the place — lines of terrariums beneath a stained drop ceiling, a worn green industrial carpet. The walls were covered with airbrush murals of garden snakes and tarantulas. A third-rate sort of place to take kids to see insects.
After he and Alejandro got permission to photograph on the premises, he started walking around and noticed orange slices everywhere, set out to attract the butterflies. Perfect, he thought. Because in addition to the whole butterfly thing, the oranges reminded him of other pictures he had been taking, of fruit left at the altars of Buddhist temples. An image of a butterfly perched on a slice of orange — it would look like an offering. He went back to his car for his bag of equipment and the big 8×10 camera and tripod.
But the butterflies weren’t cooperating. They wouldn’t land. He stood squinting at the ground glass, his head covered by the black drape, until he felt someone tap him on the shoulder.
It was one of the employees, smiling, skeptical. “You know,” she said, “We have, like, fifty of them in the freezer.”
*
The picture is framed so tightly, you see only a corner of the wooden table beneath the moth (not a butterfly, though he wouldn’t realize that until later) and a blurry portion of the white wall beyond it. The orange slice on which it rests is fairly small, making the moth look even larger. Its mottled brown wings are marked by owlish eyespots and tattered in a way that would seem to impede flight (fig. 3).
Before seeing this picture, I had never grasped what a curious thing a moth is. The photograph is like a visualization of Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of a Moth,” the great, brief essay in which Woolf watches a moth flutter around her study during the final hours of its life. She seems to see it — with its “narrow hay-colored wings, fringed with a tassel of the same color”[10] — in some impossible proximity, alert to everything about it, even as she qualifies nearly all of her claims: everything seems, or is as if or as though; very little straightforwardly is.
Soth wasn’t thinking of Woolf when he took the photograph, but it reminds me of her: the tender, puzzled way in which she composed images of whatever she could imagine and remember and see. I find a similar quality in Soth’s best work. In a picture taken in Winona, Minnesota, a man named Neil sits in the tight space between a shelf and a table, surrounded by stuff (fig. 4). There are stacks of books and bills; an old sand-colored fax machine; rolls of packing tape; plastic cups of scissors, pencils, and pens; crumpled magazines; a board game, maybe; a rag. A cardboard box labeled ‘Photos’ rests in his lap, and he holds the receiver of a landline phone to his ear, the coiled cord running vertically down the whole length of the picture, dividing it into halves. He wears a short-sleeve windowpane shirt that fits a little snugly, and his head is cropped out of the photo, so you can only see his neck and a few inches of his chin.
The obvious thought — A hoarder? — does arise, but only after a delay, and by then it seems inadequate. A more Arbus-like photographer might gawk at the scene. And as Soth pictures him, Neil is strange, but in a sense that is antithetical to rubbernecking. As she goes on peering at the moth, Woolf writes:
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it.[11]
Soth’s photos are shot through with this sort of dancing, zigzagging strangeness. The effect is not distancing but intimate. You share in it, recognizing what you are seeing as the exact mystery that it is. The pictures ask: What could it mean to look at this? What am I even looking at?
*
He would pause now and then to adjust the moth on the table, then run back and duck under the drape, butterflies flying all around. When the moth’s wings had crumbled too much, he would swap it out for a new one. They were clearly dead in some of the photos he didn’t end up using.
He was sweating — because of the drape, but also the frantic sense he always got, nervous but giddy, when taking a picture. He was so close to getting it, whatever it would turn out to be. And yet he felt sure that at any minute, it would all fall apart.
He kept stopping to run over to the table. It was late in the day; the place would close soon. And now he could hear a bunch of voices from the other room, a class of kids, maybe, drawing nearer. When they got to where he was, all hell would break loose. He had to get this thing going. He really wanted this image, he understood only now, and in a moment it would be gone.
Figure 1 — “Alejandro, Long Island”
Figure 2 — “King and Sheridan, Tulsa, Oklahoma”
Figure 3 — “Neil, Winona, Minnesota”
Figure 4 — “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”
/ / / / /
Photographs appear here with permission of Alec Soth.
[1] Alec Soth, A Pound of Pictures (London: MACK, 2022).
[2] Ed Folsom and Ted Genoways. “This Heart’s Geography’s Map: The Photographs of Walt Whitman.” The Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2005. 81:2
[3] John Mason Neale, Thomas Biggs Harned, and Walt Whitman. Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, 1847-Circa 1863 to 1864; Cardboard Butterfly, Undated. Undated; Likely Between to 1860, 1847. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mss454430216/.
[4] Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass (1855),” Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 32.
[5] Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass (1855),” 32.
[6] Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 299.
[7] Matthew Zapruder reflects on this aspect of Whitman’s writing and legacy in “Poem for Harm,” an essay published by Harpers on September 16, 2019. https://harpers.org/2019/09/poem-for-harm/.
[8] C.S. Giscombe. “First Dream.” Poets.org Poem-a-Day, The Academy of American Poets, 2018, https://poets.org/poem/first-dream.
[9] Robert Pinsky, “Culture.” The New Yorker, November 29, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/culture.
[10] Virginia Woolf. “The Death of a Moth,” in The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 3.
[11] Woolf, 4.