Alec Soth

Today, the art world and beyond is obsessed with shooting analog. Whether it's a fashion house seeking to bring a new edge to their creative work, an amateur perusing eBay for the perfect vintage Polaroid, or an influencer attempting to capture a comforting retro aesthetic on social media, analog photography has piqued the interest of people everywhere. Is this resurgence a backlash against digital photography? Is it just a trend perpetuated by our desire for authenticity in an increasingly superficial world? Or is it something else entirely? Grain: Analog Renaissance is a documentary by Alex Contell and Tommaso Sacconi that explores the stories of those committed to using film in modern day photography.

Documentary on the lives of a oil town in the Bakken region of North Dakota.

Alec Soth encountered Robert Adams’s 1985 monograph Summer Nights as a young photographer, and the book was, in his words, a “gateway drug” to the “harder stuff” in Adams’s body of work. When asked to participate in Aperture Remix, an exhibition for which artists were commissioned to create new work in response to Aperture publications that were influential in their artistic development, Soth chose Summer Nights. This film is Soth’s response to Adams, and was featured in the 2012 Aperture Remix exhibition at Aperture Gallery.

Across 19 lessons and more than five hours of material, we'll be covering a wide variety of topics; from Alec Soth's early development as an artist, where he finds inspiration and a deep-dive into his key projects, to his insights into portraiture, editing and sequencing, and creating a photobook. You will also follow your tutor as he navigates a range of different photographic scenarios creating new work, initiated after a random act - a dart thrown at a map.