Photographer Alec Soth started a YouTube channel during the pandemic and the videos range from a tutorial on setting up for a streaming book talk, to talks about his own books and projects.
He doesn’t post as often now, but in a recent video, Soth talks about his recent book, Advice for Young Artists. But there's almost no advice in the book, it's mostly pictures! Still, I think the video is worth a watch for lots of Soth’s wisdom on the artistic process.
As Soth details in the video, his recent book is all about how in his mid 50s, he is constantly trying to reinvigorate and reimagine his artistic and editorial photography practice. He encourages everyone to follow their impulses, stay alive to things, and just experiment, in order to let projects and ideas develop.
One of the ways he did that was by visiting and photographing undergraduates at art schools around the country, which he then turned into this book. I think the intro statement to the video is quite nice, where he encourages everyone to have fun and just try stuff. He then details a few unsuccessful attempts at projects (such as photographing horror movie conventions in small town hotels) before getting into the book project about 30 minutes into the video.
Soth’s description of the winding road to ending up with the idea to do this Advice project is a great example of how ideas come from work, and you have to be open to what happens along the way.
While sharing some of the images from the book, Soth does show a photo of some rules on a poster so that as he says "people feel like they're getting their money's worth." lol. Anyway, the rules he photographed are from Sister Corita Kent and you can read them here, they're quite good.
At the beginning of the video, Soth mentions it has surprised him that people use his video for ASMR or to go to sleep (he does have a soothing voice) so he closes by saying he hopes people are drifting off to sleep and dreaming of their own books and projects and then he says:
"I hope you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go out and make something goofy, make something new, maybe expose a little too much of yourself and make people uncomfortable because really, in the end, what we're trying to do here is share with each other and remind each other of our vulnerabilities and our humanity."
Advice for Young Artists by Alec Soth
72 pages, published September 2024
Available from Mack, $50
