NIAGARA
by Alec Soth

Steidl/144 pp./$60.00 (hb)

Alec Soth has followed up his widely lauded “Sleeping by the Mississippi” project with an intense and intimate exploration of another iconic body of water. “Niagara” finds Soth training his camera on the famous honeymoon destination of Niagara Falls, and ruminating on both the intensity of new love and the reality that fiery passion eventually fades significantly–if not entirely.

The images that comprise “Niagara” vary from the interiors of honeymoon suites, complete with heart-shaped hot tubs, to sublime images of the falls of the Niagara River that call to mind the nineteenth-century paintings of Frederic Church. The ultimate symbol of fading passion in Soth’s work are the falls themselves, images of which he skillfully places throughout the series. Like heated passion, the waters of Niagara Falls roil and churn as they approach a sheer cliff. Soth’s images imply that the test comes when a relationship plunges over the brink–if it survives this turning point, then passion will flow on as enduring love; if not, it will fade like the mists that rise from the falls’ basin.

Soth, as he puts it in an essay on the Magnum Web site, “brushes up against cliches” as he probes the landscape for the metaphorical meaning of Niagara Falls. Hearts are threaded throughout the series along with other loaded symbols–a sagging, solitary wedding dress hanging forlornly in a dirty room, and a display case full of rings at “Gus’ Pawn Shop”–that give form to the sorrow of short-lived passion mistaken for true love.

The feeling evoked is ultimately one of a hopeful melancholy; hope that passion will continue on as ardent love, paired with the sad realization that it often does not. One may question the ease of making sad photographs in such an emotional place, but Soth goes beyond the obvious. The inclusion of images of handwritten letters–some pleading for love, some resigned to its passing–and photographs of the raging water, reveal the complexity of attraction, relationships, and the ways we are swept and tossed by their power.

This review originally appeared in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Issue 33.5 (March/April 2006)