Alec Soth's Continental Picture Show

A college friend contacted me through Facebook today to ask if a photo feature on the New York Times Web site was by my brother. It's not, the photographer Alec Soth is a more distant relative. But my friend's query did send me to the NY Times site to check out the slideshow.

The subject matter is Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in New Orleans. Soth's work, while taken from real life, is typically seen on art gallery walls. The Times setting implies a more journalistic approach. But it always fascinates me to see how an artist covers an event differently from a reporter.

For one thing, Soth doesn't even leave his hotel room until after the Mardi Gras party ends, then documents the mess left behind. My personal favorite is a passed out reveler largely out of frame but for stockinged feet that evoked for me the wicked witch crushed by Dorothy's house.

Soth, presumably having stayed up through the night, then captures seemingly repentant early morning churchgoers with the traditional ash mark upon their foreheads.

To what I think of as journalism, or even story telling, the photo series (mixed with a sound track) feels unsatisfying. But as a record of a singular artist's subjective experience I find it no less true. In some ways more so.