A Bounty of Surface

Capturing American myths in all their majesty and mundanity, Alec Soth (b. 1969) is perhaps best known for photographing the Midwest (skeletal trees, hinterland; muted colours). In the series I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, however, ‘I was trying to strip it down', and, indeed, the portrait Nick. Los Angeles (2017) has ‘something airy about it'. Light in more than one sense of the word, Californian sunshine bounces off every surface and chevrons across the floor.

Doing away with grand narratives such as class, politics, nationhood, ‘I was getting myself back to the fundamentals of portraiture – just that one-on-one encounter, without it being layered with all this other meaning', Soth says. To be sure, simplicity and levity run through the series, as if carried over from his previous project Seesaw, which staged 90-minute silent sessions on the playground favourite. 'I love the luxury of being able to just stare at another person,' he says – a pleasure that Nick, a model who the photographer met by chance during a trip to Los Angeles, seems to understand: reclined in jeans on a shaggy blanket like an ad for either, he seems complicit in the seesawing of intimacy and distance.

A bounty of surface could just as easily describe ‘The Gray Room', the poem from which this series takes its title, by the modernist poet Wallace Stevens. ‘He was so accepting of the surface,’ Soth says, whereas ‘I always want there to be more, I want to get under’. Yet, shooting this series was different. ‘I had this nice balance,’ he says. With Nick, this sense of equilibrium makes even the slightest detail wink with oracular meaning: the painterly bursts of pink, out-of-focus bougainvillea on the left find their foil in a heavy, chintzy, berry-coloured blanket on the right. The scrambling plants surrounding the glass room speak to a vaguely metaphorical tangle of wires on the floor inside it.

'I love moving through an image and finding little details like that,' Soth says. It is one of the reasons he favours a large format camera. ‘Especially in a larger print, you can move through that space,’ and because of the long lens’ compression, ‘you feel space in a different way.’ Rooms, stanzas, frame the encounters in I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating. Overcoming the practical challenges of shooting with a large camera in tight spaces, here the photographer stands outside, capturing his own reflection in the glass like an afterimage from looking at the sun. Perversely, this is also a self-portrait.

The photographer finds himself entangled with a model in a fiercely competitive city where everyone wants to Make It, the wires on the floor snaking towards Nick’s musical aspirations, just out of sight. For Soth, ‘it's quite exotic’ in Los Angeles. ‘Maybe there’s a desperation. But I also think there's something really beautiful about it – about that aspiration.’ There is.