Advice for Young Artists: Alec Soth

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes
across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title
- perhaps like the visits themselves - is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth
offers an angular and unresolved refl ection on artmaking at different stages of life and
the relations of photography, time, and ageing. The photographs here range from formal
studies evocative of the classroom to more unruly works of self-expression. Ambiguous
stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotes and
unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Among the students, Soth himself appears at
intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst.
Inspired by Walker Evans's late Polaroids, this latest body of work reveals a new expansion
of Soth's practice and a new vantage, twenty years on from the publication of his first
book. Recalling the conceit of Broken Manual, it uses an instructional format as a spurious
cover for introspection and provocation. As much as a study of the experience of the
young artist, this is a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one.

MACK, 2024. Hardcover, 72 pages 10.5 x 10.7 in