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The freewheeling photographer captures the strangeness of everyday life in the United StatesA couple of years ago, Alec Soth, the great road-tripping witness of American life, decided to retrace the path of the most famous funeral procession in his nation’s history: the train journey that carried assassinated President Lincoln’s 6ft 4in corpse from Washington DC to his home town of Springfield, Illinois. The steam-powered cortege was witnessed by millions of Americans, among them the poet Walt Whitman, who was moved to write his elegy, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Soth set out on his journey with a line from Whitman’s poem in his head – “And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial house of him I love?” – and a notion “to mourn the divisiveness in [contemporary] America”.Soth made his name as a photographer with Sleeping By the Mississippi, his landmark 2002 journey along the human margins of the storied river. He quickly found the polemical impetus of his Lincoln project too confining. He continued his journey but adopted another more freewheeling line from Whitman instead: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list…” He followed his eye, rather than his head. Continue reading...