At my presentation last week, which went very well thankyouverymuch, I started with some images by Alec Soth.

I really like Soth’s images, but when I look at his work I sense an ambiguous relationship between him and his subjects, as though he doesn’t truly respect the people he photographs. Or perhaps, like Diane Arbus, he identifies with them but doesn’t like himself. In his photographs, the American poor and working class — whether along the Mississippi, at Niagara Falls, or in their Bible study groups — come across as the “other.” Perhaps they retain a sense of mousey dignity, but there’s implicit judgment.

Soth likes to stare, so we could give him the benefit of the doubt; he could just be showing us (like Jacob Riis or Weegee) something we ourselves voyeuristically want to stare at.

Do I do the same thing? Does my sense of Midwestern propriety — although attenuated a lot over the last decade — create negative value judgments in my own work?

These questions occurred to me yesterday. My newest set of images (just back from the lab) pick at some of the common threads of my Commonwealth project: signage, post-industrial landscapes, suburban development, powerlines, and clutter. Often (but certainly not always) something is amiss, unexpected, or absurd. I think — I hope! — that my images are playful without being snobbish, that the judgments are gentle in the pseudo-documentary mode I occasionally employ.