Thursday, January 10, 2013

Alec Soth at the NC Musum of Art



Work by distinguished Minnesota photographer Alec Soth is featured in a show now up at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in the museum's Julian T. Baker Jr. Gallery through June 30, 2013.

The show is called Wanderlust: Photographs by Alec Soth, and offers fifteen of Soth's images from his Sleeping by the Mississippi and NIAGRA portfolios.

This show is well worth a visit if you are in the Raleigh/Durham area. It is of interest to us for several reasons.

One is that some of the images in the Sleeping by the Mississippi portfolio were made by Soth in the American South, including the one above, Bonnie (with a photograph of an angel), which was made in Port Gibson, Mississippi, in the year 2000.

On the basis of this work, Soth received a commission from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to do a portfolio of work in the South, which was on view at the High in 2009, in the early days of this blog, and so we talked about it here.

Another is that the work on display at the MC Museum of Art is from the collection of Allen Thomas, one of the most important collectors of photography in the USA at the present, and Allen lives in a small town in eastern North Carolina.

Thomas has been very important in the NC Museum of Art's recent developing of interest in photography. This is only the most recent major show of photography at the NCMA, and in the Raleigh area, to be drawn from Thomas' collection or to be curated by Thomas himself.

He has exceptional insight into contemporary photography, not only in the South but nationally. His influence is especially valuable to us in the photography community in North Carolina.

For all these reasons, and for the value of the work, this show is definitely worth checking out.

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