Little Brown Mushrooms

I’m so happy to finally announce my new Steidl book: Broken Manual. Four years in the making (2006-2010), this book represents a significant departure from my previous publications. Working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, we’ve created an underground instruction manual for men looking to escape their lives.

It is common to follow up the publication of a book with a ‘Special Edition,’ but in the case of Broken Manual, this edition is being presented first. I think of this as the ‘Ideal Edition’ of Broken Manual. Each of the 300 copies of the book is housed inside of another, one-of-a-kind book. These signed and numbered ‘shell’ books are unique and cut by hand. Inside the shell, there is also a small booklet entitled ‘Liberation Billfold Manifest’ and an 8×10” print signed and numbered by myself and Lester B. Morrison.

The book can only be purchased at Steidlville (UK) or Little Brown Mushroom (US).

Note: This special edition will be installed as a part of my survey exhibition at the Walker Art Center (September 12 – January 2, 2011). They will be shipped to buyers in January 2011.

More info here.

In connection with my exhibition at the Walker Art Center, I’m creating a series of Flickr group projects that are linked to my photographic process.

A trick I use to find pictures is to create a list of things I’m curious about that then go and beat the bushes. Even if I don’t find what I’m looking for, it gets me out the door and moving around in the world.

For our first Flickr Project, I’ve created a list of 10 items to photograph. Shoot as many as you can and post them in our group pool, and then check out our “Discussions” pages to talk about your work. I’ll post some of my favorite images on the Walker Art Center Visual Arts blog. On October 1st I’ll pick my favorite treasure hunter and send them a signed copy of the From Here to There catalogue.

Here’s the list:

Pilots
Amateur Paintings
Unusually Tall People
Museum Guards­
Sleeping Children
Neighborhood bars
Supermarket Cashiers
Sheep
Sedans
Suitcases

Happy Hunting,

P.S. You’ll get extra points for combining pictures – I’d love to see an unusually tall museum guard holding a suitcase.

After months of dealing with hackers, we finally moved alecsoth.com and littlebrownmushroom.com to a new host/server. There have been a few bumps in the road but things seem to be working. Thanks for your patience.

Meanwhile, today I began installing my exhibition at the Walker Art Center. Can’t tell you how good it feels to move from the scale model to the real space. And I’m SO SO HAPPY with the show. The first thing I said upon seeing the work was “maybe my career isn’t over.” Speaking of which, today the fantastic curator Bartholomew Ryan posted an interview with me entitled: Dismantling My Career: A Conversation with Alec Soth.

I hope to post more installation pictures this week on on Tumblr / Facebook / Twitter.

Stay Tuned,

Photographing outside of Steve LaFontaine’s home in Northwest Arkansas, 2007

This week I begin installing my exhibition at the Walker Art Center. I can’t wait to see my new project, Broken Manual, on the walls. I’ve been at work on this beast since 2006.  I’ve photographed from Georgia to Alaska and just about everywhere in between. Along the way I’ve met some wonderful people. These folks are not just the ‘subjects’ of my photographs. In many cases they are true collaborators. It has been so gratifying to be in touch with two of these collaborators this week as I finally prepare our work.

• The Arkansas Cajun, Steve LaFontaine. In the process of photographing hermits, monks, survivalists and so on, I’ve met a lot of sad men. But Steve isn’t one of them. Steve lives his life with fierce conviction. He’s a lean and mean renegade, but that doesn’t prevent him from also being a really great guy. I was so touched by this recent blog post by Steve.
• Lester B. Morrison. Brother Les has been a collaborator for a number of years. A lot of you know him from this blog, but Les doesn’t get out and about much. So it was so great when he agreed to show up for his opening at the Soap Factory last Saturday night. There are picture of Lester here and here.

Stay tuned for details on my collaboration with Lester, Broken Manual (which includes a portrait of Steve LaFontaine). In the meantime, you can purchase a new trio of zines by Lester here – but act fast, 1/4 of them are already sold.

I think I finally cajoled Lester into going out into public tonight. He told me he’ll make an appearance at the opening of his exhibition at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. The Soap Factory will be selling copies of the new Zine Trio by Lester. If you are lucky, maybe he’ll even sign them for you!

PS. See Lester’s work in the City Pages

This is a big weekend for Lester B. Morrison. On Saturday Les will be having his first exhibition at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis. In honor of this momentous occasion, we’re launching not one but three new zines by Morrison. As many of you know, we published Lester’s first zine, Lost Boy Mountain, last December. It went on to be named one of the best books of 2009.

Lester’s new zines are Library for Broken Men, Lonely Bearded Men and Lester Becomes Me. All zines are individually numbered in an edition of 500 but are sold as a single package for $13. More info here.

Buy yours here.

P.S. Stay tuned for Broken Manual, a collaboration between Lester and myself published by Steidl.

Dear Readers,

We’re sorry the blog has been so quiet lately. We wish we could say that Little Brown Mushroom is tanned and rested after a luxurious vacation, but just the opposite is true. Over the last couple of months we’ve been frantically preparing for a cluster-bleep of activity this fall:

• Alec Soth’s upcoming exhibition, From Here To There, at the Walker Art Center and the accompanying catalog.
• Alec Soth’s new project and Steidl book in collaboration with Lester B. Morrison, Broken Manual (stay tuned for details)
• A documentary film about the making of Broken Manual, Somewhere to Disappear, by Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove.
• The Auckland Project, a collaborative book by Alec Soth and John Gossage.
• Brighton Picture Hunt, a collaborative book and exhibition with Carmen Soth as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial
• Ash Wednesday, New Orleans, a book derived from Soth’s ongoing New York Times series, The Continental Picture Show.
• Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth, a new book exploring the creative world of the fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy.

We hope to provide more energy to this blog starting tomorrow. But we’re taking the rest of the afternoon off and going to State Fair (the official end to Minnesota’s summer). Hopefully we’ll post some pictures from our staff outing on our Tumblr and Facebook sites. Otherwise, come back tomorrow to check out the new publication we’re launching!

Location is a quarterly publication of limited edition artists’ books featuring idea-based work in an array of two-dimensional media. Essentially a gallery between two hard covers, Location focuses on book-form installations and group exhibitions in print. Our mission is to collaborate with visual artists to produce new work specifically suited to a page-based format. Location promotes artists to a broader audience through a portable medium while providing a book-based experience of contemporary art.

For its second volume, Location books features a collaborative experiment between artists Adam Caillier and Michael Mott, two “strangers with complimentary abilities and a malleable set of expectations” who employ a film camera as an extended-space-scanner to compose a cryptic series of abstract photographs specifically catered to serial pages.

Location – Volume Two
Work by Adam Caillier and Michael Mott

What: Opening reception, book sale and signing with the artists (Caillier and Mott)
Where: 1618 Central Ave NE, Suite 227, Minneapolis, MN 55413
When: Saturday, August 14th, 2010, 7:00pm – 10:00pm

For more information or for higher resolution images please visit here

Win the ‘Little Brown Mushroom Love Pack’ over at Hey, Hot Shot.

LBM’s mission statement on PhotoEye.

In Rome, In California

Hey, Les.

Long time no scribble. Pardonnez moi, svp. Many changes in my life over the past few months.

I’ve found a new cave. It’s near the water, not too high up, high ceilings (can you say “cathedral”?). Northern exposure, and in a bit of a valley, so there’s not too much direct sun. But that’s jake with me.

I was reading Paul Auster again. I know, I know. But the title—Man in the Dark—spoke to me. I won’t labor the narrative details, but it’s about a man divided between two worlds, two ways of life. One was prompted by recollections of violence, a race riot, about which the narrator says the following:

That was my war. Not a real war, perhaps, but once you witness violence on that scale, it isn’t difficult to imagine something worse, and once your mind is capable of doing that, you understand that the worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in. Just think if, and chances are it will happen.

The country we live in is comprised of the worst possibilities of our imagination. Now, that’s a thought to either keep us hunkered down in our dark spaces, or make us confront the darkness to dispel it while denying the abyss, the Mariana Trench of our imaginations. Which way do we go?

Yrs,

OG (forgot how to sign my name, it’s been so long)

The Indie Photobook Library was founded in 2010 by Larissa Leclair. It is an archive that strives to preserve and showcase self-published photobooks, photobooks independently published and distributed, photography exhibition catalogs, print-on-demand photobooks, artist books, zines, photobooks printed on newsprint, limited edition photobooks, and non-English language photography books to be seen in person through traveling exhibitions and as a non-circulating public library. Having a specific collection dedicated to these kinds of books allows for the development of future discourse on trends in self-publishing, the ability to reflect and compare books in the collection, and for scholarly research to be conducted in years, decades, and centuries to come. The Indie Photobook Library has an open and ongoing submission policy. Books can be donated by the artist, indie publisher, or private collector.

info about submissions and more here

for news and more, follow on the Indie Photobook Library on facebook here

The extraordinary Carrie Elizabeth Thompson has an exhibition up at the XY and Z gallery in Minneapolis.

There will be a reception for Carrie on July 8th from 6-9pm. The gallery will also be open regular hours (M 11-7/ F&Sa 1-9/ Sunday 12-5) until August 2nd.  Stop by and check out the show.

Also check out this interview with Carrie and the other 2009 McKnight Fellows here.

Check out the new arrivals on our Tumblr site

During this years Santa Fe Review I had the pleasure of meeting Dana Popa. I was so impressed by her work I decided to find out a little more about her project not Natasha.

You are a storyteller, tell me about how you decide to frame your stories?

I first learn about the subject I am to photograph. I also look into the ways the same subject was shown before, I prefer defying the stereotypes, when possible. I believe that with social documentary photography, at the end of the day, no matter how one envisions a narrative flow of the story and preconceives a story, one has to make the best of what the immediate reality offers. And for me this is a constructive challenge.

Why did you originally decide to photograph the topic of sex trafficking?

I found out what sex trafficking really means, this is what triggered my work. At the time there was not much visual coverage of the illegal trade…

So I decided to get a closer look at sex trafficking and record what it means for these women to survive sexual slavery. I chose to look inside their souls – which for me at the time seemed very difficult to do, but that is what I was most interested in. And after having heard their stories, I wanted to look at their traces: at what women who had disappeared for years and who are believed to be trafficked and sexually enslaved leave behind. This became an essential angle and part of the narrative.

After being involved in this project, I am realizing that its beginnings might have also been triggered by my interest and knowledge of the woman’s position in societies like the one I was born in.

What was your childhood like? Can you relate to these women through your personal experience and upbringing?

In the case of not Natasha, I should admit that all my childhood I was used to see sad faces of the women who might have experienced domestic violence. As well, poverty was not something new or exotic for me, not that I was poor myself, I am coming from a middle class family, but one can see poverty at all pace and at different levels across my native country.

You said in an interview with Photofuison that Moldova is Land in limbo, that it is the main supplier for sex trade, and poorest country in Europe. Do these things make the trafficking worse?

Of course! Poverty is the real reason for people’s vulnerability. There will be exploiters to take advantage of their vulnerability and despair to live a better life. In this case, jobs abroad were offered to women and women would take the risk. A job abroad, in a world of dreams, is the only possibility for one to escape poverty. It is easier for traffickers to go to poor villages and target jobless people living in terrible conditions.

Willing and forced? Your work is forced prostitution! Why did you decide to focus on forced prostitution?

Oh, it is great that we can draw a clear distinction between forced prostitution and willing prostitution. Well, I wanted to make the distinction even starting with the title of the project. ‘Natasha’, as Dalia explained to me, is a nickname for sex workers with eastern European looks, and the women who had been tricked into a world of dreams and then lured into different destination countries and forced into sexual slavery ‘hate the name of ‘Natasha’! Because we are not Natasha’s, do you understand?”  Dalia told me. These women did not opt to become sex workers, they were locked in all sorts of locations, from flats and houses to brothels, threatened, beaten up and raped, put on drugs and alcohol and forced into it.  When I researched my subject, it was shown that women from Moldova had been sent to as many as 42 destinations.

What was the hardest aspect of this project for you?

Getting access was the hardest aspect. I worked a lot to establish all sorts of connections with NGOs fighting sex trafficking in different countries. I received less than half of the help I needed to make the story. The rest I had to do myself, which was difficult and took time.

Access to these women seemed to be a huge challenge. How did you explain why you were doing this project to the women in order to gain access?

Access was the most frustrating part all along the years I did this work. It took a long time and if I wanted to photograph a new angle of the story, getting access would still take long, even though my work on sex trafficking was known by then; I can’t explain why. I initially got access through 2 local NGOs in Moldova; the social workers allowed me to visit the women who survived trafficking and were now living back in their homes, or wherever they returned to.  It was important that I stayed faithful to my concept, I wanted to see how the women who had gone through the most horrific experience kept on living, and living with a deep pain, forever traumatized. It was not hard to explain why I was interested in them. The most pleasant part of the learning process was when I spent time at one of the shelters that offered them psychological assistance and accommodation for a month or so.

You worked with a physiologist at the shelter, did working with this person help you understand what these women have gone through?

As soon as I had a short conversation with the psychologist at the shelter, I understood that she would be the right person to introduce me to the trauma these women were still going through. This way I could learn and understand about the women that had escaped sex trafficking without me asking certain personal questions that could create unwanted moments between me and the person that I was photographing.

Why did you want to photograph these women after they returned home?

I wanted to look at the deep marks that sexual slavery leaves on a human being. I wanted to show what one couldn’t see: the interior hidden trauma; that was the challenge for me. I also wanted to look at the reason why women would take the chance, leave their children, families behind and flee their country; also if they integrate back, if the society puts a stigma on them. I was also aware that this angle would give me time to meet more women and to dig deep into this subject and to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

Empty spaces represent missing women? Can you tell me more about this?

I had the opportunity to continue the work through a commission from Autograph ABP that later published the book. I followed my story line looking at the spaces where the women who are sex slaves once belonged. Their presence was strong there, and one could still feel it through the families who were longing for them, through objects left behind, through their rooms kept intact, exactly as they where when they went missing or little pictures transformed into little altars. Later on, I looked at the places where such women are held captive and forced into prostitution. This was my way of representing missing women: through empty spaces that once were filled with their natural presence and empty spaces where they are forced to exist.

Captions, tell me about these words in the back of the book.

Words are of paramount importance for the story. I have been told that I took beautiful pictures of sex trafficked women. Well, words come to tell the horrific story these women went through. And the words are their words. At times I would be amazed at what women who survived sex trafficking would tell me. Words like ‘why do you have to dig up my life again?’ or ‘my husband sold me’ or ‘(…) only the thought of my daughter back home kept me alive” are not to forget, their honesty and maybe need to shout struck me; I thought I had to give these girls, whom I was photographing, their own voice. The story is told better like that. So I thought of leaving the pictures to flow throughout the book, to bleed the pages in silence, like some moments of my meetings with them were. Leaving the pictures to the interpretation of the reader was a good way of telling the story. And then read the words at the end. Mark Sealy the director of Autograph knew the stories behind the work and decided that my journey in making the work was part of the story, therefore by adding my notes at the back of the book, the reader would get closer to the experience and the subject of this project. And it would also have the structure of a journey, which is what the women had experienced from the moment they fell into the hands of traffickers.

I began by asking about your story telling. I would like to end by asking you if you were more interested in the story or getting the story out into the world once you finished?

To be honest I give more importance to taking the story out in the world once it is finished. That plays again an important part in the photographic process.

Check out not Natasha here

Buy not Natasha here, here or here

Read unedited interview here

What are you working on today?

My new work focuses on post communism everyday youth and their lives against the fleeting memories of a bygone past that still permeates the selves and the landscapes. I am opening a reflection on the notion of identity in a place that soaks itself in the nothing-works status-excuse, 20 years on after its liberation, Romania.

Check out new work here

Following up on yesterday’s (weirdly controversial) post, here are some examples of book covers that I’ve agree to:

If this topic is of interest to you, be sure to check out Covering Photography.

Ten years ago I made this picture:

In 2006, a publisher (Little, Brown and Company) asked if they could purchase the rights (and Photoshop a child in the snow). This was their proposal:

I said no. Three years later, I stumbled across this book at Barnes and Noble:

Now I hear that Winter’s Bone became a movie and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

I can’t wait to see the poster.

Dear valued LBM customers,

We are shipping the copies of Trent Parke’s book as fast as we can. Due to the high-volume of sales and a lack of robots at the LBM headquarters, we are slightly backed up.  We will make sure that you receive your copies as fast as we can get them to you.

Thank you very much for your patience!

We are sold out of Trent Parke’s Bedknobs & Broomsticks over here at Little Brown Mushroom!

Sorry to all those who weren’t able to get a copy, but this thing sold fast!

For those of you in the NYC area, you can still head over to Dashwood tonight and try to get your copy at the signing. 6-8p.m. 33 Bond St., NY, NY 10012

Trent Parke and his publisher are in New York City this Thursday night for a book signing at Dashwood Books. Come say hi.