French designer Fifi Chachnil in Paris. Photo: Alec Soth
City Pages in Minneapolis has a nice feature up on Alec Soth by Jeff Severns Guntzel . There are some interesting bits on Soth’s process — he processes all his film naked in the bathroom tube — but I was most taken by his reflections on his latest project with Fashion Magazine.
… Soth was commissioned by Magnum International, a highly selective, notoriously fussy collective of photographers founded in the aftermath of World War II by iconic photographers Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The assignment was literally to create a fashion magazine. Soth flew to Paris and took photos of models in their homes and a fashion show at the Grand Palais. And he learned that models weren’t really his thing.
The problem, he says, is they are incapable of being natural. “They can’t help themselves–I’m not interested in people who are famous or who get photographed all the time.”
Barring Chan Marshal of course. Needless to say, I thought this sentiment speaks well to his work as a whole, since he so frequently shoots strangers.
