Inspired by the late Polaroids of Walker Evans, the photographs in Alec Soth’s new book Advice for Young Artists gather his impressions on life, art-making, and ageing, captured in his encounters visiting twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. To mark the launch of Advice for Young Artists, Alec Soth will be discussing his latest work with writer Charlotte Jansen. The event will include a book signing.
Monday 16 September
19:00 - 20:30 BST
Foyles
107 Charing Cross Road
London
WC2H 0DT
Tickets here
About Advice for Young Artists
Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title – perhaps like the visits themselves – is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an angular and unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life and the relations of photography, time, and ageing. The photographs here range from formal studies evocative of the classroom to more unruly works of self-expression. Ambiguous stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotes and unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Among the students, Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst.
Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this latest body of work reveals a new expansion of Soth’s practice and a new vantage, twenty years on from the publication of his first book. Recalling the conceit of Broken Manual, it uses an instructional format as a spurious cover for introspection and provocation. As much as a study of the experience of the young artist, this is a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one.
