Soth V Relle

I would say Alec Soth’s approach aesthetically is very different than Frank Relle’s. Soth seems to want to create a feeling of authenticity in his images, whereas Relle is concerned with creating fantasy. For the most part, both are concerned with ordinary things that perhaps wouldn’t be looked at twice: a car parked outside of a dilapidated building, a lonely tugboat on the water, a tower of video tapes staked up. Soth’s body of work is far less unified than Soth’s, the images range anywhere from an image of a slug to a disco ball hanging in the middle of the woods. I would say that flipping through Soth’s was a bit of a surprise because you didn’t know what you were going to see next and where that was going to take you conceptually or visually, whereas Relle’s was far more cohesive and predictable. The moods created in both bodies of work are a divergent: Soth is concerned with portraying the desolate grit of this anonymous environment and seems to take a more natural or pessimistic approach. He utilizes lighting that is bleak and low, and uses negative space to create a sense of isolation and pensiveness. On the other hand, Relle seems to relish in the apparent liveliness of these buildings, broken and all, and strives for a more fantastical and optimistic approach. The garish color usage and worm’s eye view of the camera are Relle’s tools. At times, his work even appeared to be so fictional as to be tiny dioramas that only mimic reality. I would say that Relle is really able to personify these structures, despite the fact that there is no human there. In Soth’s work, the mood was at times so lonely that you almost forgot there are people to connect with within the image.
To reiterate:
Soth’s effectiveness lies with his ability to catch people off guard. There is a line of landscapes that the viewers scroll through, which is juxtaposed with an image of a book with its contents cut out. On the other hand, I would say that his unexpectedness is a double edged sword. Perhaps you look at his Broken Manual and get lost in translation. You can either call his images “frustratingly confusing and chopped up”, or “mysterious and varied”.
Relle’s effectiveness is his ability to create whimsical and inviting environments out of what might otherwise be called shitty and dangerous looking places. However, the same things that make this happen (i.e. over the top color saturation, odd perspective, etc.), is what one might consider cheesy or tacky. Also, there are so many photos with similar perspective and cropping that I feel as if I was seeing the same images repeated. Again take you pick: “unified; strong sense of a body of work” or “repetitive and predictable”