Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth is one of the defining publications of the photobook era. First published by Steidl in 2004, it was Soth’s first book, issued in three printings, and established him as one of the leading figures in contemporary photographic practice. This is the second printing of the MACK edition and includes two new photographs that were not featured in the earlier Steidl versions of the book.
Created through a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America’s iconic yet often overlooked “third coast.” Soth’s richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs bring together an eclectic cast of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensual in their details and raw in their subject matter, the images create a sustained atmosphere of loneliness, longing, and reverie. As Anne Wilkes Tucker writes in the original essay published in the book, “In the book’s 46 ruthlessly edited images,” Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.
Like Robert Frank’s classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi combines a documentary approach with a deeply poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the book’s subject than its organizing structure. Free from any rigid concept or ideology, the series emerges from a distinctly American spirit of wanderlust. Sixteen years after the book’s original publication, the artist’s lyrical vision has undoubtedly acquired a more nuanced meaning, bringing hope, fear, desire, and regret together in an evocative journey along this mythical river.
