Alec Soth Guest Edits Aperture’s Summer 2022 Issue
The acclaimed photographer brings together an issue about dreams and chance.
Alec Soth, Ed Panar. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2019
Courtesy the artist
It is easy to imagine Alec Soth daydreaming in pictures. As an acclaimed photographer, teacher, publisher, YouTuber, and one-time blogger, he is as dedicated to thinking about what pictures mean as he is to making them. Since his 2004 debut, Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series he described not as a chronicle of place but an excuse to wander, Soth has made lyrical bodies of work—modest meditations on consciousness—that parse the surfaces of the everyday. “In my projects, I allow myself to change course and follow my nose,” he notes of his process, which is decidedly driven by a search for serendipity.
As guest editor, Soth pursued a theme that wouldn’t constrain him. “This ‘Sleepwalking’ issue,” he says, “is one in which I’m always surprised on turning the page, where good old descriptive photographs of the real world tap into the logic of dreams. I want the reader to feel like they are sleepwalking.” We hope you enjoy the journey with eyes wide open, or shut.
Read more from Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking.”
