Alec Soth

Black Line of Woods

When the High commissioned Alec Soth in 2006, his career was at a turning point. His richly descriptive images that captured the idiosyncrasies of rural America had been included in numerous high-profile exhibitions, and he had published two acclaimed monographs, including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an era-defining photobook loosely about the storied American waterway. Eager to avoid becoming complacent, he accepted the High’s invitation, which afforded him the opportunity to take risks and redefine his practice.

Soth initially wanted to examine the urban character of the “New South,” but the pictures he made in Atlanta felt flat, so he ventured north into the Georgia mountains and to North Carolina. Two seemingly disparate encounters, one with a Trappist monk and another with the story of the fugitive bomber of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, stirred him to explore the romantic allure of escape through the hermetic lives of outsiders living in the South. He traveled extensively throughout the region to photograph landscapes, humanmade structures (tree houses, forts, cabins), and men who choose to live on the outskirts of organized society (hermits, monks, survivalists). Distanced in both their compositional and psychological approach, Soth’s photographs demonstrate empathic insight with the desire for solitude without shying away from the potentially nefarious impulses that motivate some people to withdraw from the mainstream. He named the series Black Line of Woods after a short story by Flannery O’Connor, because it was, as he explained, “evocative of this barrier between the social and the mysterious other world.”

After completing the commission, Soth expanded the project, photographing similar subjects across the United States. Inspired by the ad hoc survivalist guides he came across in his early research, Soth published the cumulative work as an apocryphal handbook called Broken Manual in 2010. He edited together images of varying styles and formats with a dialectical text by an alter ego named Lester B. Morrison. The finished book speaks in a tangle of disparate voices and stands as a capricious meditation on contemporary masculinity.

View all works in the commission.