Niagara2006-reprint2018
“Niagara is part of American mythology. It’s a place of romance, where people go to get married,” says Alec Soth. “But when I got there my view of the place totally changed. The American side is economically devastated. It’s bleak.” (British journal of Photography, 2006)
Niagara depicts a time that now appears distant. It’s post-9/11 so the United States is already in decline, but it’s a nation yet to fully grasp the vengeful nature of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars or America’s fading voice and influence on the world stage. A bleakness and emptiness indicative of this decline is what stands out in Niagara, and that, in part, was what Soth was photographing. It revealed the human impact of an economy in disarray, which at the time was regarded as only temporary. The American Dream was always a fantasy but it was one that resonated with a global audience. In Niagara, even more than Sleeping by the Mississippi, that dream is being chipped away.
Niagara still meditates on universal narratives and tells stories that engage with basic human needs. There’s love, betrayal, heartache and loss; it tugs at the heartstrings and it’s intended to. It does this through the pictures but also through the letters and notes that accompany them.
That use of ephemera is now more common in contemporary photobooks, but there’s an honesty to the letters in Niagara. They are filled with an emotional directness that still has the power to move. The same could be said about the photographs. Within the slow process of large-format photography, there is a tenderness and a vulnerability to the people portrayed in the book. Niagara is emotional, it’s awkward but intimate, and in that sense perhaps it is a reflection of Alec Soth, the artist, the poet and the man. I don’t know, maybe he’s not like that at all. But I like to think so.
“A lot of the pictures are of the aftermath of passion and love. You see couples and their love letters and then you see the aftermath and the Falls could be a metaphor for the crashing passion,” says Soth. The Falls appear throughout the book, the images gathering pace to their tumultuous conclusion. So to end the book, we see the Niagara river heading inexorably to its fate, the river collapsing into the maelstrom of the whirlpool below. First comes love, then comes the fall. Niagara is beautiful, claustrophobic and dark, an intensely poetic and thoughtful work on the disappointment of broken dreams, a work rooted in one place but universal to all.
