shashasha

“How much does a photograph weigh? … For those of us who’ve made a life out of recording light, there’s a mass to the amassing.”
― from Alec Soth’s afterword

Shot between 2018 and 2021, Alec Soth’s series “A Pound of Pictures” follows a wide array of subjects on a roadtrip that follows the route of the funeral train that carried Abraham Lincoln’s body from Washington, DC, back to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield in Illinois after the president’s death in 1865. The stream-of-conscious-like nature of the book, interspersed with quotes by poets and thinkers like John Berger, allows connections and themes to emerge seemingly of their own free will. Soth, who compares his creative process to “websurfing in the real world,” follows his instincts and interests on a thoughtful rumination of America, connections and the weight of images.

“If the pictures in this book are about anything other than their shimmering surfaces, they are about the process of their own making. They are about going into the ecstatically specific world and creating a connection between the ephemeral (light, time) and the physical (eyeballs, film). These accumulated connections hopefully create constellations of possible meaning.”
― from Alec Soth’s afterword