His is a personal voice that makes itself heard in all his works, even where he curiously seems - or pretends? - not to have noticed. In the book Niagara, at a certain point he decides to insert what he believes should be a "postcard" image, similar in all respects to those that hundreds of millions of people take from the same point, almost without choice. Right there, so he wanted to return to that spot to take the photo of the girl taking a selfie, the one we were talking about. “The cover of any travel guide essentially depicts this panorama. What I find paradoxical is the fact that this is the best-selling photograph of the entire series "- he tells Zanot. Out of curiosity, I therefore undertook the search on the internet for such photo-postcards taken by millions of photographers exactly from that balcony overlooking the falls. Is it possible - I wondered - that his photo is essentially identical, or at least similar, to those taken by all the visitors? After a careful examination, the answer is that, of course, it seems to resemble, but is in reality different, very different indeed.
The hundreds of photos that appear on the internet are in fact all committed to showing us the grandiose and triumphal aspect of the descending water of the falls, that raises a watery dust; all this among bright lights stretched out to emphasize even more the joyful aspect, based on a slightly tacky idea of ​​the natural sublime. None of this happens in the image of Soth, instead immersed in a bluish and declining light, where the waterfall appears as a wound in the dark sea of ​​water in the foreground.
You have the sensation of being on the edge of a sinkhole where the vortex of water rushes into the bowels of the earth while we, in turn, fall towards the darkness of our unconscious. A scene at the same time magnificent and disturbing that troubles our imagination with its ambiguous and metaphorical aura. This is a further demonstration of how stereotyped and empty the statement "everything has already been photographed, let's just take care of the images that already exist" is. Indeed, Soth's image clearly demonstrates that what matters is not so much what is photographed, but above all how it is photographed. Moreover, this interrogative ambiguity also runs through the entire book A Pound of Pictures, where every image, apparently random, is instead found there, with exactness and relevance, in that precise page of the book and not in another, and which nevertheless , instead of showing something immediately understandable, it imposes itself every time as an allusive question mark. And so Soth himself declares: "I have always maintained that the closest relative of photography is poetry, because of the way it stimulates the imagination and leaves the viewer gaps to fill" (Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot).
The challenge of the book is basically that of intertwining his trip to the United States with his need to testify how much photography is a medium based on the impossible desire to preserve a moment, to possess and retain what one has seen and loved. Thus, starting from a project that was supposed to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln's funeral train from Washington to Springfield in Illinois, at the end, of that idea, only a few scattered images remain, such as that of a couple near his grave and that of a plaster bust of Lincoln, unexpectedly tied to a car seat.
As the rest goes, freedom, his camera is allowed to be oriented as if by an inner compass that led him to photograph here and there, but above all to take photographs of piles of photographs, of photographs reflected perhaps on the dashboard of his car, of people who photograph themselves or are being photographed, of people who draw live or who have their bodies tattooed with somewhat magical flowery designs ... But in this context, what are the various photographs, present in the book, of Buddha statues portrayed in unusual places doing there?
They have a place in there, and an important one at that! Being a spiritual teacher for millions of people, the Buddha had placed the importance of awareness and acceptance of the impermanence of things at the center of his philosophical-religious vision. A decidedly antithetical concept to that intrinsic to photography, based on the impossible desire to fix time, to keep it forever. And so our author wanders between Buddhist temples and monasteries asking the monks the following question: "Could it be that photography, with its desire to possess and stop time, is the opposite of what Buddhism claims?". Such was the response of a monk questioned: «No, no, no. I always take photographs. I like them!". In short, photography is alive with its “desiring” ability to go beyond religious and cultural barriers.