Salish Park

In 2004 when I was living in Brooklyn my cousin came into town for a visit and one of the things she wanted to do was check out the Whitney Biennial, something I’d wanted to see but wasn’t going to because I was broke. She has a rich boyfriend and paid for the both of us so I got to see Alec Soth’s work there. It was displayed in a room that also contained some photographs by Katy Grannan, whose rep at the time also represented a photographer I was assisting (actually that photographer was who first recommended I see Sleeping by the Mississippi). Also there was a sculpture by an artist whom as it turns out Alec Soth once happened upon on the banks of the Mississippi River while taking pictures and there was a series of photographs of surfers. Curiously that room and a wall with a bunch of lightbulbs on it are pretty much the only things I remember from that visit.

So it was a neat thing to find that Alec Soth has started a blog. In one of his earlier entries he writes “a large percentage of the photography audience is other photographers—and a large percentage of photographers are nerds.” I’m part of that photography audience and I am a nerd, that’s for sure. It’s fascinating for me to read some of the things that artists, writers, musicians think about. Sometimes that would be nothing, as described in a recent article in the New Yorker on Bob Dylan: “I wanted to meet the mind that created all those beautiful words,” Judy Collins told David Hajdu for “Positively 4th Street.”… “We set something up, and we had coffee, and when it was over, I walked away, thinking, ‘The guy’s an idiot. He can’t make a coherent sentence.’ ”

But sometimes there are some interesting insights. The New Yorker article also quotes David Van Ronk (I’d never heard of him but the article says Dylan swiped his arrangement of House of the Rising Sun): “We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living.”

And later: “Musicians… Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, ‘Escaping the Delta,’ points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. ‘If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,’ Chuck Berry said, ‘it would be Nat Cole.’”

It’s interesting to read that Alec Soth is a fan of Christian Patterson, who also has a blog, and Christopher Anderson, among others, many of whom I’d never heard of before. Also I read that he used a Mamiya 6 for Dog Days, Bogota.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.