American Suburb X: "A Conversation with Alec Soth" (2009)
This is the never ending struggle, I think storytelling is the most powerful art, for me. I just think there’s nothing more satisfying than the narrative thrust: beginning, middle, and end, what’s gonna happen. The thing I’m always bumping up against is that photography doesn’t function that way. Because it’s not a time-based medium, it’s frozen in time, they suggest stories, they don’t tell stories. So it is not narrative. So it functions much more like poetry than it does like the novel. It’s just these impressions and you leave it to the viewer to put together.
[…] My big theory is that in photography it doesn’t function as a narrative, but the photographer takes the place of the protagonist in the story, and you take the place of the photographer. I use the example of the last picture in The Americans, where Frank shows the picture of his child and his wife in the car. That picture makes you really think about him, about the journey. That’s what gets me excited about photography.
