Developed through road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet often overlooked “third coast”. Alec Soth's richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs present an eclectic mix of people, landscapes and interiors. Sensuous in detail and unflinching in subject, the book sustains a mood of solitude, longing and reverie. “In the book's forty-six ruthlessly edited images,” writes Anne Wilkes Tucker in its original essay, “Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics and cheap sex.”
 
 
 
Like Robert Frank's The Americans, it combines documentary style with poetic sensitivity. The Mississippi is less its subject than its organising structure. Unbound by rigid concepts or ideology, the series grows from a distinctly American spirit of wanderlust. Sixteen years after its first publication, the artist's lyrical vision has acquired further nuances, bringing hope, fear, desire and regret together in an evocative journey along this mythical river.