Alec Soth: The Space Between Us

Jeu de Paume, Paris
15 April – 15 June

Review by Catherine Spencer

A miasma of awkwardness and uncertainty, something forestalled and out of synch, lingers over the photographs of Alec Soth, collected in a mini-retrospective at the Jeu de Paume that's aptly titled The Space Between Us. That space is the space of photography, and the particular power of Soth's work derives from his ability to play on the perceived limitations of his medium and transform them into its strengths.

Soth sometimes feels painfully like a travelling salesman when approaching a potential subject, camera in hand, awkward about the intrusion and uncertain that anything concrete will be achieved from it. His best work though does not rest with a mere recognition of both physical and emotional distance, but explores the tensions, embarrassments, fears and curiosities that at once create and are created by that distance.

In Kristen, St Paul, Minnesota (2007) (Soth's birthplace), a teenage girl stands gauchely in her ice-skates on a dirty slushy street, facing the camera with a look fluctuating between confrontation, disinterest and pride. The ability to note minute details – neon pink nail varnish matching the plastic covering her blades, a line cut by a swathe of thick lilac eye shadow just beneath her brows – feels initially invasive, and then like an exercise in futility: however many observations you can collect, you're still no closer to fathoming her closed expression.

Other portraits here, ranging from 1999 to 2007, also court an uneasy friction between presence and absence. Stacy, South Plains, Texas (2004) highlights a woman standing in profile against a hazy field of sheep, her face guarded and wrinkled into a frown that could spell grudging fascination or concern, at once engaging and resisting the viewer.

Earlier projects, like Sleeping by the Mississippi (1999–2002), Dog Days Bogota (2003) and Niagara (2004–2005) provide the real clout to this show. In each of these series Soth weaves still lifes and portraits to form an elegiac evocation of a particular place – a style that has earned him comparisons with the tradition of American itinerant photographers such as Carleton Watkins, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston.

Sleeping by the Mississippi is exemplary: Soth followed the sinuous windings of America's longest river to create a dream-like depiction of the life lived along its banks; abandoned mattresses floating in brackish water and bedsteads swamped by lush vegetation merge with a gallery of Faulkner-esque figures. Dog Days Bogota, an attempt to 'find beauty in a hard place' (and dedicated by Soth to his adopted Colombian daughter), similarly shows his finely gradated, subtle responses to individuals and their surroundings, gently teasing out touches of lightness and hope from scenes of enervating poverty, from shots of mangy canines cocking their heads winningly at the camera to young children cradling cheap but much-loved toys.

Soth is a masterful manipulator of distance and presence, evoking whole other worlds of thought and feeling operating furiously just beyond the edge of consciousness. But he's best of all when freed from the restraining co-ordinates of documentary, conjuring a variety of emotional, intellectual and sensory responses, all of which bring home your fundamental inability to bridge the gap and be sure of what you are seeing.