Because the Mississippi delta is the "Cradle of the Blues," the river's poetic legacy is a floodplain of pathos. New Deal photographer Walker Evans famously chronicled its cemeteries, sharecroppers and prison farms, but his human subjects hid all expressions of joy. Alec Soth is an old-school, Walker Evans-style photographer in that his subjects are the object of his art. However, he works with a lighter heart and an eye for irony.

In this age of egocentric, manipulative photography and small candid cameras, Soth lugs heavy equipment in search of characters with stories to tell. Because of its narrative nature, his exhibition "Sleeping by the Mississippi" resembles songwriting more than current art photography. The show has overlapping themes, beginning with a tribute to the music of the river. At the grim boyhood home of Johnny Cash, where 1936's floods drove the family off the land, Soth found optimism. As he explained, those floods deposited so much rich silt on the land that in following years, harvests were bountiful enough that the family could afford things like guitars and dreams. The photographer visited the Harbor Marina in Memphis, where Jeff Buckley swam to his sweet hallelujah, before his body floated up at the foot of Beale Street's music clubs. Soth dropped in on the famous Memphis photographer William Eggleston, but shoots him playing music. At Jerry Lee Lewis' childhood home, Soth found the singer's sister Frankie Jean, who lives there, but sleeps in a sleeping bag on the shag carpet floor.

"She just doesn't want to muss a bed," he says.

Empty beds are thematic. Soth even quoted poet John Berryman (who leapt to his death from a Mississippi River bridge): "Empty grows every bed." A nightmarish, deserted hospital bed in Green Island, Iowa, looks as therapeutic as a Civil War amputation board. The show includes flotsam beds in swamps and a mattress floating under a blues icon, the Helena Bridge. Beds are dream catchers and Soth asked his subjects about their dreams. Charles Lindbergh's boyhood bed certainly evoked flying dreams, as do several other subjects, including a prisoner in Kentucky who said his dream was to own a school for pilots. Lenny, an erotic masseuse and body builder, dreams he will "live to be 100 and still look the way I do now." At a massage parlor in Davenport, a daughter said her dream was to become a nurse, while her mother told Soth that she had given up dreaming long ago. In a neon-washed Minneapolis tavern, Soth intervened in a dream.

"The thing about Kym was that she had only left Minneapolis once in her life, to go to New Orleans. She had a good time there and recounted that to me, but she had taken photos and then left the camera in a taxi. So, when I went to New Orleans I tried to photograph the places she had told me about," he says, before adding that the tavern had been demolished.

Soth's river flows through very different regions. The upper Mississippi, including Iowa, is a cold land of denial; the further south, the more open and decadent things become. From a frozen statue of an amputated Christ in Buena Vista to a lilac-blossomed Palm Sunday in Louisiana, his camera warms to southern light. And human subjects lose inhibitions, from Lenny's denial to life-accepting brothel mongers in New Orleans and Memphis. Beyond Venice, La., the southern-most point on the river that a car can travel, Soth finds the "Dead Zone," where run-off from Midwestern agriculture's chemical addictions have eradicated marine life. Walker Evans' camera would have been at home here, but would not have found the Devil's boudoir - a wrought-iron bed in the bulrushes of man-made Hell. (At the Des Moines Art Center Downtown through April 21.)

Art News

Drake's Anderson Gallery has two "Best Of" shows from the American Institute of Graphic Arts - top book designs, plus the nation's outstanding graphic designs... Sherwood Gallery's annual Pace print show begins Feb 9... Des Moines Art Center artist in residence Tony Pontius signed with Moberg Gallery, and is featured in its current show. CV

Comment on this story | Return to top