Alec Soth Quotes

If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.

For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers.

I'm like the annoying guy in the street.

It's a weird combination that makes a great picture. It's a complete mystery to me.

If limitation spawns creativity, is the limitless resource of the Internet a good thing?

Watching my daughter sort of live in this world where a photograph is not something to keep a memory. It's something to just speak with. It's language.

You can photograph anything. You can be inside, outside, doesn't matter, you're controlling the light. It gives you great flexibility. That was a primary motivation.

I admire photographers that don't need a destination. In some ways, street photography is like that. There's a quality of wanderlust for sure in my work, but I need a destination.