For his latest book, A Pound of Pictures, Alec Soth originally set out by car to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 funeral train, hoping to consider America’s current political division through the prism of a past historical crisis. When that idea felt forced, he let it go. But he kept driving. In Los Angeles, he encountered a woman who, to his astonishment, sold photographs by the pound. This discovery yielded compelling images of images and gave Soth a leitmotif: the weight of photography’s own history. For Soth, this weight was not a burden but rather a wellspring of connections and associations found in the surfaces of his surroundings and in his travels to cemeteries, darkrooms, and bedrooms that reference Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Nan Goldin, to name just a few touchstones that appear in the book.
In January, as yet another new COVID variant sent people back indoors, Soth spoke from his home in Minneapolis, via Zoom, with the writer Siri Hustvedt about the rhythms of narrative, Walt Whitman, and the democratic possibilities of sleep.
Siri Hustvedt: I thought we should focus on your most recent book, A Pound of Pictures (2022), in order to rein in our conversation a bit.
Alec Soth: What’s good about that is, it has a retrospective quality where I’m thinking about the medium.
SH: There is a real narrative pulse to this book. Even before opening it, the viewer-reader encounters a fairly long Whitmanian list on the cover. You establish a rhythm for what we’re going to see—an introduction to what I think is a crucial aspect of narrative: rhythm.
AS: Absolutely.
SH: Do you know this quote from Virginia Woolf? She was writing to Vita Sackville-West about literary style: “As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm.”
AS: That’s beautiful.
SH: I think the rhythmic foundations of narrative are corporeal and prelinguistic, but the way we imagine time in space is connected to literacy. The way we read images has a spatial component that acts as a metaphor for
