A Quote by Alec Soth

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life. — © Alec Soth
Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
Surfing and music have always been two completely separate things in my life, and a lot of people, especially in the UK, don't really get surfing very much. They think it's the Californian dream. They're like, "Oh, so you're a surfer and you're this and that," and it's like, I go surfing because I like the outdoors. In England it's freezing cold, and it's usually dark and raining and it's the middle of winter, and you do it because it's invigorating. It's like going on a walk in some remote place on the planet. It's really - it's not very glamorous.
Every part of me is a surfer. I love surfing, and I love the waves that I surf. So that's the thing that I get excited about most: What kind of waves am I going to be able to surf? Am I going to be surfing alone, or will we be surfing waves that no one's surfed before? Second to that is photography.
I sometimes struggle, because my job is like the antithesis of what surfing is all about. Surfing's simple. It's real.
For me surfing is just something that I love to do. I grew up surfing, is sort of like a family requirement. I can't imagine my life without it. But I am not defined by it, nor is my music. They are very separate.
... photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.
I always liked photography in film - I studied photography growing up. I like the medium of film; I like physically holding 35-mm film. I like the way it looks, the quality when it's projected. I like the way it frames real life.
All I care about, to be honest, is surfing. I love surfing more than anything. To me, there's nothing like that.
The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.
To lose your everyday life of surfing and being creative on waves, enjoying the ocean - that's scary to me. It was essential to at least try surfing again and get out there and see how it went.
I really enjoy surfing a lot. It's an awesome sport. With surfing there are no mind games versus Peyton Manning, or versus anyone else. It's not me trying to throw a certain shot put further - or to put a ball in a hoop, it's just me against mother nature.
[My photography teacher] gave me the Mexican Day Books of Edward Weston and just blew me away with this work. The fact that you could be this fabulous visual artist, with all this milieu of people like Diego Rivera and you could sleep with these gorgeous, amazing women, that you could live that life - that photography could deliver you that life.
Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.
I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.
I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.
I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
It's for 'Haasil' that finally I got to do a lot of water surfing. Kabir Raichand, my character performs surfing and to do it accurately, I had undergone a crash course in Mauritius.
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