‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’ (2004) is one of my favourite Alec Soth books, because of how the photos tell a story. The series was taken during a series of road trips along the Mississippi River and I think it really feels as though you are going on a journey along with Soth as you navigate through the pages of the book, which I love! Again, as in all of Soth’s books, there’s an obvious colour scheme, here it is mostly greens, yellows and reds. I think it’s important to have a consistency of colour in a book so that the viewer doesn’t become confused and the images stand together rather than apart.
Reoccurring themes are also a great credit to Soth’s work. In this sequence, Soth photographs a mixture of landscapes, people and interiors but the themes continue throughout each one of them – making the book flow. Some of the obvious themes in ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’ are loneliness, dreaming, longing, sleep, religion, the working class, and of course the geographical area plays a large part in the style and meaning of each photograph.
As well as consistent themes, there’s a lot of reoccurring imagery throughout this book. Sleep and dreaming is a prominent theme and represented often through images of beds, mattresses and graveyards. More thoughtfully, this idea of dreaming is also expressed through images of people looking longingly towards another life. Other images that are repeated are crosses (representing the impact of religion in the area); landscapes which set the scene and feel of the book straight away; and also images of images. A lot of these themes and ideas are obvious, however it’s the subtle repetitions that makes this book so great. Like the image of a body builder on a wall, which is echoed on another page of a large muscular man sat at a table. And the photo of Martin Luther King pasted on a door that once again reflects the constant theme of dreaming.
I want the images in my book to work well together and tell a story. Perhaps it would be an interesting idea to take a photo each day, and sequence them chronologically in the style of a diary? Visually, I think a lot of the photos I have taken so far work really well together. The muted colours, low lighting and contrasting light and shadows are a consistency of mine. I need to just think about how I will order them and what themes and ideas I want them to express. Of course, some of my current themes are ordinary, every day, domestic setting, interior, objects, food, light. It will be interesting to see what other themes and ideas my classmates might interpret from my photographs when we have our group tutorials.
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