Gathered Leaves

Gathered Leaves is not a single book but a mid-career retrospective in a box. MACK issued it as a set of postcards and miniature facsimiles, a way to hold and reshuffle Alec Soth's first four major bodies of work.

MACK published it in 2015 to accompany a touring exhibition curated by Kate Bush. The set surveys everything Soth had published since 2004: Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, and Songbook. Its title echoes Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; each project is treated as a leaf gathered from a longer, ongoing document of America. The box itself is embossed cardboard, in a clamshell form. Inside are twenty-nine large-format postcards reproducing images from across the four bodies of work, each with an essay by the writer and photographer Aaron Schuman printed on its reverse, alongside an introductory card by Bush. Four miniature facsimile books, one per project, sit alongside the postcards. A reader can move through each full sequence in miniature.

Soth was born in Minneapolis in 1969. He is a member of Magnum Photos and founder of the imprint Little Brown Mushroom. Gathered Leaves sits at the hinge of his career: a look back at the work that made his name, before he continued the line with Songbook and, later, A Pound of Pictures.