Sleeping By The Mississippi

Photography by Alex Soth
Open Eye Gallery, Wood Street
4th December – 5th February 2005

Reviewed by Kenn Taylor

Sleeping By The Mississippi is the first solo UK exhibition by renowned American photographer Alex Soth, a collection of large format colour pictures taken during Soth’s 5 year odyssey along the trail of the famous Mississippi river from its beginning in north Minnesota, to its end in Louisiana. A collection of the life and landscape he saw on the way, showing at Liverpool’s renowned photography gallery Open Eye.

The images in the exhibition are quite different to the clichéd images of the Mississippi, if you were just expecting grainy shots of swamps and southern gentlemen on paddle steamers you’d be wrong. The landscapes are very vivid and full of eye-catching detail which capture the changing scenery along the route, from the frozen image of a cemetery in winter in Wisconsin to the heat of New Orleans.

Soth has taken a great variety of images, the landscapes along the river itself and a collection of portraits and interiors which together don’t just capture the changing scenery and climate along the river but the variety of life that goes alongside it, and the differing characters and locations that go to make up America. Well worth a visit.