Alec Soth’s Mississippi Dreamers in a Nightmare America
Alec Soth, Joshua, Angola State Prison, Louisiana. All photos from Sleeping by the Mississippi. Courtesy the artist and MACK.
The photographs in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, which have just been published in a new edition, contain a freedom-seeking, derelict melancholy: deceptively clean, silver early-morning surfaces, a mattress floating in a swampy puddle, a casually arranged set of rescued furniture resembling a wall-less living room in some forlorn woods, a family of bikers grieving underneath a canopy of Spanish moss, weeds growing wild through the springs of an abandoned bed frame. When the book was originally published, in 2004, I was drawn to the vagrancy of its title, the down-by-the-river evocation of it.
It took me another minute to consciously realize that “sleeping” pointed naturally to Its portraits and scenes formed a larger story about individual longing; the way we impress upon our tiny worlds; the way we project our desires and the idealized pictures of ourselves onto our walls and out into our yards and onto the symbolic river. The third image in the
