Photographer Alec Soth’s new book offers tongue-in-cheek advice for young artists

Internationally acclaimed photographer Alec Soth didn’t intend to create the photo book “Advice for Young Artists.” But in September 2022, when a Plymouth hotel hosting a horror convention wouldn’t let him take pictures, he photographed various goth people he had cast for the shoot in an Airbnb.

“It became kind of this party of loners,” he said. “And I had such a great time doing it.”

That experience sparked something in him. Then, when he was on a freelance assignment for the New York Times in Kentucky in January 2023, he went searching for similar loners to photograph. He couldn’t find them. So he visited an art school, and although he didn’t locate anyone, he felt that spark again. On the way back to the Twin Cities, he visited an art school in Tennessee. That’s where he found the people he realized he had to photograph: young artists.

“There’s something like, I just wanna be around these people,” said Soth, who lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two kids. “And that’s around the time where I was like, ‘Oh I’m just interested in young people and creativity more than this ‘loner party’ idea.’ ”

His new book, “Advice for Young Artists,” available now from art book publisher Mack, implies that he can help youth, but in fact they’ve helped him.

A portrait of an art student deep in thought, standing in between two canvases, a Band-Aid on his forehead, his eyes slanted down. An art student with blue-tinted hair wearing a gray grandpa cardigan, deeply focused on a charcoal drawing. Taxidermy animals in studio, forever waiting to be drawn. An art student posing for a portrait while Soth’s image appears in the mirror, obscured.

“It’s like a book of advice, and I am starting to lay out the advice, or a draft of it — I’ll put something here about accepting yourself, I’ll put something here about patience — but I haven’t done it, it’s half-assed, I can’t really do it,” he said. “It’s like notes to myself. You can hear me talking to myself.”

Soth even photobombs some of his own pictures. He keeps his face hidden (as in a nude self-portrait) or so close-up that it’s blurry. It may be a reference to some of his early self-portraits, where he poses like he wants to be seen and not seen at the same time.

On the book cover, there’s a portrait of Soth drawn in pencil. It emphasizes his age by highlighting wrinkles and his salt-and-pepper hair and beard, and the image is inside a frame that’s been shattered.

His former intern Katherine Bockelmann, 28, drew the portrait. He wanted her to make it like that.

“He says that a lot, that it’s cringe,” she said. “But he kind of wanted that, kind of like a way to see himself, truly, through the eyes of another artist, especially a young artist.”

Soth’s large-scale photography merges documentary with a thoughtful introspection and poeticism. He’s known for his pictures of people and places across America, and is often compared to Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Robert Shore. He’s a member of the prestigious international group, Magnum Photos. He does freelance work for the New York Times. He has published more than 30 books and has had more than 50 solo exhibitions worldwide.

At 54, it seems like he’s done it all. So why wouldn’t he have great advice for young artists?

But at his modest St. Paul photography studio, it doesn’t feel that way. At various moments, the photographer is as gentle and soft-spoken as an awkward teenager, a sort of subtle shyness and self-deprecation coating his words.

The tongue-in-cheek “advice” in this book follows the tone of his 2010 book, “Broken Manual,” which purports to be a guide on how to run away from your life, but it never follows through with it.

Soth first became known for his 2004 project, “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” where he took large-scale color photos of people, landscapes and interiors as he road-tripped. Each is laced with a loneliness and sense of longing, capturing a certain sensibility that is America.

Sometimes, that experience of the road trip is better with a group of teens, something that Soth created in the 2015 Winnebago Workshop, a project he did with his studio Little Brown Mushroom. He and a group of teens took an RV from the Twin Cities for a week, holding workshops along the way.

Cooper Gatzmer, 25, met Soth during that workshop eight years ago. For a time, Gatzmer was Soth’s intern. Later he became his photo assistant, traveling with him for his 2022 book, “A Pound of Pictures.”

A photo that Soth snapped of Gatzmer painting a skinny man with long brown hair and an angular, model-esque face ended up in the new book. Gatzmer didn’t know he was in the book until it came out.

So with all this experience under his belt, where is Soth’s actual advice?

The printed Post-its scattered throughout “Advice to Young Artists,” and the page of various rules on being an artist offer some general suggestions: “Accept yourself.” “The only rule is work.” “Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.” “Be patient.”

At first, as a teen, Gatzmer thought maybe anyone could make a living as an artist. But soon he realized it wasn’t that easy.

“When you’re young and frustrated about it, you’re like, ‘No, that’s not good advice. I’m doing art everyday and nothing good happens,’” Gatzmer said. “So then it’s like, ‘Well, then be patient.’”