Alec Soth’s New Book Advice for Young Artists Grapples With Growing Up

Alec Soth is known for his honest, unflinching depictions of American everyday life. But in his new book, Advice for Young Artists, the Minneapolis-based photographer has forged an entirely new path—one that proves why The New York Times described Soth as possessing the unique ability to make “a photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers.”

For Advice for Young Artists, Soth traveled to 25 different undergraduate art programs across the United States. From 2022 to 2024, the 55-year-old visited and shot the students there, in hopes of harnessing their youthful, spirited energy, and learning something from them. (Contrary to the “deceptive” title, as Soth told Frieze earlier this month, “I don’t have any advice.”)

Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this latest body of work expands upon Soth’s practice, 20 years after the publication of his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi. Rather than containing literal bits of advice for these bourgeoning artists, Soth captures the students at the precipice of their art-making journeys. The images offer a look into the stages of a young artist’s life, with themes of time and aging at the forefront. The compositions throughout the book suggest Soth is deep in reflection, mulling his own motivations for becoming a visual artist in the first place. As such, the photographer becomes the pupil.

From more formal photographic studies of a chaotic undergrad classroom to quiet, considered still-lives, Soth places himself within his images and among the students in Advice for Young Artists. As much as these images are a meditation on the experience of entering the professional art world and the experience of being a young artist, they are also Soth’s quiet considerations about becoming an old one.

Keep scrolling for a sneak peek at Advice for Young Artists, published by MACK.