I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating

Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens' poem "The Grey Room," the Alec Soth's latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limits of photographic representation. Although these large format color photographs are carried out all over the world, they do not concern a place or a population in particular. Through a process of intimate and often extended, Soth's portraits and images of his subject's surroundings involve an investigation into the extent to which a resemblance photographic can represent more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable to the both the keeper and the photographer. "After the publication of my last book on social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four large-scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year, I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some kind of epic narrative about America, I just wanted to spend time watching other people and hopefully briefly glimpse their inner lives. In order to try to access these lives, I took all the photographs in the spaces interiors. Although these rooms often exist in remote locations, This is just to emphasize that these images do not concern any location in particular. Whether a photo is taken in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: just spending time in the presence of another beating heart.” - Alec Soth