Songbook

Songbook turns Alec Soth's eye from the solitary Americans of Sleeping by the Mississippi toward community life: meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings across the country, stripped of their news context and read instead as a search for connection.

From 2012 to 2014, Soth traveled state by state working as a community newspaper reporter, publishing his own self-produced paper, The LBM Dispatch, alongside assignments for the New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley he attended hundreds of local gatherings, and Songbook collects the resulting photographs as a fragmentary, often funny and often sad portrait of the tension between American individualism and the desire to belong. MACK published the 144-page hardcover in 2014.

Soth, born in Minneapolis in 1969, is a member of Magnum Photos and the founder of the publishing imprint Little Brown Mushroom. Songbook followed Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual as part of a body of work that returns repeatedly to the American road and the people who live along it.