I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating

Alec Soth's 2019 MACK monograph turns his camera away from the American road and into private rooms. Large-format color portraiture stands in for the earlier work's social documentary. The question is simpler and harder: how much of another person can a photograph actually hold.

Its title comes from Wallace Stevens's poem "The Gray Room." Soth made the pictures between 2018 and 2019, in interiors from Minneapolis to Odessa. No captions tie a face to a place or a story. There's just a sitter, a room, and the time Soth spent looking. He has described the project as a stripping-down of the medium to its plainest elements, after years of photographing American social life: an attempt to simply spend time with people and catch a glimpse of an interior life the camera can't fully name. The book appeared alongside four simultaneous solo exhibitions, in Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. It closes with an interview between Soth and the novelist Hanya Yanagihara. MACK printed it as an 84-page, debossed linen hardback.

Soth was born in Minneapolis in 1969. He is a member of Magnum Photos and founder of the small publishing house Little Brown Mushroom. This book followed a run of major projects, including Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, and Songbook. Its quieter, more intimate register anticipated the interior focus he'd continue in A Pound of Pictures (2022).