Mockingbird • The Brief Gallery • 238 5th Ave. N.

→ Photo Info (Here) Alec Soth Sunshine. Memphis, TN
2000 On the wall behind her, the mirror reflects a very out of focus image of the girl, Sunshine laying on the bed, that you can’t make out in detail. How does she see herself? What are we seeing? Her eyes are definitely not evasive and because of the clarity of the photograph, it is possible to look deeply into them. They look as unforgiving and authentic as the setting that she appears in.

Photographs rendered from an 8”x10” large format camera have the potential to let you see, with extreme clarity, what was before the lens. Something that illustrates this, and also makes you wonder about the deeper meaning, is Sunshine’s painted false fingernails. The middle nail on her left hand says “Big J” on it. Even though it is very small, it’s something that is another suggestive road to contemplate and provides even more depth and emotional gravity to the photograph. You would never be able to see this in a web-version of the photograph, only in the original print. The photograph was taken in Memphis during Alec’s seminal road trip project, “Sleeping By The Mississippi” that lead him from the head-waters of the Mississippi River, beginning in his home state of Minnesota, to then follow the river all the way down to the point where it spills out into the Gulf of Mexico on the southern coast of Louisiana.