What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

   In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! [1]

Alec Soth. Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, 2012 (video still); single-channel video; 6:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ginsberg’s verse is an unsurprising endnote to Soth’s video, a nearly seven-minute-long work composed of dozens of fixed camera shots, lingering on sites throughout Minneapolis in the fading light of a summer evening. The locations documented are so mundane they could be from any middle-American town: a freeway overpass, a gas station, a commercial parking lot, a strip mall, the pavement outside a fast-food restaurant. A moonlit “neon fruit supermarket” is very much at home amid this imagery. But beyond the similarities in the settings conjured, Ginsberg’s quote captures a dynamic at the heart of Soth’s project: acknowledging the profound influence of an artistic predecessor (Whitman) while making art very much about one’s time, art that describes a uniquely contemporary experience. Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree was created as an homage to one of Soth’s greatest influences, the photographer Robert Adams and his 1985 publication, Summer Nights. Adams’ revered photo book documented his late-night walks in Colorado, focusing on spaces where artificial illumination bled into darkness. Summer Nights first motivated a young Soth to shoot in the evening.

Alec Soth. Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, 2012 (video still); single-channel video; 6:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

In its present installation at Colby College Museum of Art, Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree is shown alongside another Adams project, Turning Back. Featuring more than 100 photos picturing deforestation in Oregon, the series was made in response to the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Alongside images of clear-cut swaths of land, Adams includes quotations from Lewis and Clark’s journals, describing the thick and dense expanse of trees they encountered when they first arrived. These sharp points of contrast present the legacy of westward expansion with solemnity. Turning Back flickers between a call to action and a wrenching acknowledgement of all that cannot be undone.

Alec Soth. Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, 2012 (video still); single-channel video; 6:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, on the other hand, doesn’t elicit any sense of moral urgency or overtly lament what was lost to the current built environment. Instead, through Soth’s impeccable framing and the richly ambient noise captured with every setting, viewers cannot help but slow down and revel in the inadvertent beauty found in the most ordinary and drab spaces. Wind ripples through bushes overlooking a highway overpass; a woman combs her hair with her fingers while waiting for her ride outside of a strip mall; a man wearing a headset sits on a patch of grass in a parking lot, perhaps on break from his call-center job; one person practices a golf swing while filling up the car at a gas station; a lamp is turned on in the living room of a small, one-story ranch home, illuminating an American flag hung on the wall. As the video progresses, dusk slowly creeps into the frame, and each scene descends deeper into darkness, punctured with neon and halogen lights. The little vibrations captured through video, the small movements and oscillations of everyday experience within these landscapes, are visually captivating but without sociopolitical motive or message. Soth’s camera idles in the most banal of American settings and, in doing so, invokes both the recognizable malaise of killing time and a surprising reevaluation of such settings that only prolonged looking can bring forth.

Alec Soth. Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, 2012 (video still); single-channel video; 6:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

It is undeniable that Soth’s practice is heavily informed by the contributions Adams made to the American photographic canon, both formally and conceptually. And while both artists share a deep sensitivity and visual attunement to their environment, Soth’s embrace of video in this project renders this artificial and ubiquitous landscape in vivid, simmering, unforeseen dimensionality.

Alec Soth: Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree is on view at Colby College Museum of Art through June 5, 2016.

[1] Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47660.

Alec Soth, 2008_02zL0189 (leprechaun man), 2008, Edition of 7 + 3 AP, Archival pigment print, 40,6 cm x 50,8 cm / 16 x 20 inches, Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

The images make these men and their more basic living situations heroic. One man, depicted with religious garb and standing among a thicket of trees, becomes a nobleman in search of a purer way of life to get closer to god. Another, of 2007_10zL0006 (I love my Dad), seen only through his impact on his ramshackle house, appears to have gone on a self-prescribed psychological retreat to assess his familiar relations without burdening others with his problems. A survivalist to be sure, one’s new accommodations consist of a blanket on the ground and jerry-rigged electricity overhead. Simple living at its best…?

Alec Soth, 2007_10zL0006 (I love my Dad), 2007, Edition of 7 + 3 AP, Archival pigment print, 101,6 cm x 127 cm / 50 x 40 inches, Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

What reinforces the show’s conceptual ideas is how Soth has aligned his process accordingly. Traditionally, there are certain formal rules about how a photograph should be displayed. Standardizing decisions such as matting, framing, processing techniques, and scale across an entire show can formally tie images together quite easily, but limits the ability of each individual image to speak for itself, within and without the show. Soth, however, has subverted these common notions about Photography to some extent, by considering what presentation techniques best serve each photo within the show’s larger narrative.

Variety in colour, saturation and lighting elicit emotional connections with the subjects of each image. Some are sombre and reflective, or matter-of-factly objective while others have a hint of the fantastic. One can see, throughout the show, the deliberateness of Soth’s artistic choices in conveying the notion that it is important to ask why and take agency of our own situations rather than follow the path that some faceless majority has established as “the way”.

Alec Soth, 2007_05zL0059 (Edsel's stick), 2007, Edition of 7 + 3 AP, Archival pigment print, 76,2 cm x 61 cm / 24 x 30 inches, Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

Where this is most apparent is with his black and white images of objects, such as 2007_05zL0059 (Edsel’s stick). The presentation of these objects transforms them into relics or historical documents, and angle Soth as some sort of anthropologist, respectfully investigating these subjects and their alternative lifestyles. At first glance, they may seem out of place in a room full of picturesque vistas and men with little facial expression. Without them, however, Soth’s position may appear somewhat exploitative or voyeuristic, and may prevent the viewer from experiencing reverence for the subjects. It is in this manner that Soth has sculpted the narrative of exhibition into complex reflections on life and managed to engage in and question the common practices of the medium he employs.

On view at Loock Galerie until July 23, 2011.

Postcards from America is certainly reminiscent of the 1935, Farm Security Administration (FSA), a project part of the New Deal for which photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others, were sent out to document the condition of rural families and areas during the depression. The difference in this contemporary iteration is that it is completely conceived and motivated by the photographers themselves, instead of any government or institution. This crucial characteristic gives the road trip the qualities of a trip with friends, one driven by adventure, curiosity, and the desire to show a side of the US that is often swept under the proverbial rug.

The project originated as an idea by Jim Goldberg and Susan Meiselas at one of Magnum’s annual meetings. In efforts to try to re-establish the way photographers and viewers experience the US, they brainstormed how to “see what America really is instead of just reading about it,” they “wanted to see and feel America.” (Meiselas)

From left to right: Carlos Loret de Mola, Lara Shipley, Ginger Strand, Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky.

Like most road trips, this one started with a handful unforeseeable set backs (maybe Friday the 13^th should have been a day spent in hiding); San Antonio experienced massive flash floods; Jim Goldberg caught the flu; the projectionist at the Ransom Center had technical difficulties during almost the entire panel discussion – but they approached the entire situation with the sense of humor shared between friends, which helped the audience, myself included, laugh along with them and appreciate the spontaneity and organic development of the project. As Alec Soth said on Friday, “the spirit of the road trip is you let it take you.”

Paolo Pellegrin, San Antonio, TX

While the projector was being fixed, each photographer and the writer, Ginger Strand, introduced him or herself by talking about their approach to the trip and what they had already experienced the day before in San Antonio. Each individual set off in search of something, and the amount of incredible material, images and stories they encountered in just one day was astounding. Once we saw images from the day before, it was clear that the project will reveal a truly diverse view of the US.

Alec Soth, Mu Man from Burma, San Antonio, TX

The Postcards from America project will conclude with a pop-up show at the Starline Social Club in Oakland, Ca on May 26^th. For more information, check out the Postcards from America site to track the group on their journey, through their blog, twitter and facebook updates.