<\/span>As a photographer, Soth relates a gentle engagement with his subjects. A young couple lie on a bed of moss. She nestles against her partner\u2019s pale stomach, their hands meeting at the edges of the frame. In what is a beautiful and mature photograph, both subjects return Soth\u2019s attention with a still and trusting gaze. It\u2019s almost unfashionable, perhaps, among the reserve of these knowing times, but this is a work imbued with both humility and a precise craft.<\/p>\n
In a previous project, made in a factory, so noisy as to negate any meaningful communication, Soth asked workers to write down the concerns they dwelt upon through the isolation of their working days. Elsewhere, on a Mississippi highway, sitters were asked to write down their dreams as Soth prepared to photograph them. It is a useful strategy, and in this latest work these fragile phrases acknowledge lives at a turning point. In exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York earlier this year, these notes achieved a status and scale equal to the portraits and architectural studies. <\/p>\n
A critic once wrote of watching Sonny Rollins perform, noticing that \u201ceven his feet looked sad\u201d. When happening upon Soth\u2019s architecture, it is embroidered with snow and crazed concrete. Yellow basket seats, coupled like caged birds, extend skywards, with cherry blossom softening rigid concrete shells, and the critic\u2019s phrase returned to me. When photographing interiors, two hand towels are shaped as swans, touching over a flowered bed, a wedding dress hangs from wire in a bare, timber-panelled room, and an invite is extended \u2013 to anyone \u2013 to \u2018Joy\u2019s divorce party night\u2019. There is a considerable twilight in Niagara. As night draws in to leave neon and the last pastels of colour, there is a sense that we are at the end of something, and Soth emphases this by employing Nabakov to introduce his series \u201c\u2026 both doomed were we\u201d.<\/p>\n
The pleasure in this book comes from its ambition. It follows no singular strategy, it doesn\u2019t deal with the current crises of terror and threat. There is no war here \u2013 this is not late photography, dealing with the malevolence of another time. It is an involved work, a committed observation of relationships and their consequences. By inviting Richard Ford to write the essay at the start of the book, Soth nods to a canon of writing that foregrounds such detailed considerations of private, unremarkable lives.<\/p>\n
To return to Raymond Carver, (with whom Ford was close friends) the letter Myers begins to write, like some of those that interrupt Soth\u2019s photographs, is asking for the forgiveness of a wife and family he hopes to return to, in a hometown far from his emotional exile. The title of the collection it is drawn from, echoing the moving words in this book, is \u201ccall if you need me\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n Ken Grant <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
![\"Niagara\"](\"http:\/\/www.foto8.com\/reviews\/V5N3\/resources\/Soth_Niagara_B.jpg\" "\\"Niagara\\"")
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