Little Brown Mushroom Books were the publishers of Alec Soth‘s “The Last Days of W”, a self-published 48 page newsprint publication that came out at the time of the 2008 Paris Photo. Although I very much liked the pictures on the wall there, I couldn’t bring myself to pay even the lowish price asked for this because it just didn’t seem to me to do justice to his work – and it was better to leave it to my memory and what I felt were rather better reproductions on the web. The 10,000 copies soon sold out, and many have written in praise of the publication. Probably one day it will become a high priced collector’s item, although doubtless by then fading and falling to pieces.
Alec Soth used to have one of the more interesting blogs written by a working photographer – in my blogroll still, and most of us wondered how he ever found the time to do it. By October 1, 2007 he had obviously got to wondering too, and made his last post, though his archived blog is still on line and still makes some good reading.
But the good news – which I read in a new post there – is that he is now a contributor to a new Little Brown Mushroom blog, like the book company based at his studio address in St Paul, Minnesota, USA, where he is one of a team of six on the blog. (Check out Carrie Elizabeth Thompson‘s rather minimal web site too.) Little Brown Mushroom Books has also just published Lost Boy Mountain its first zine by another of the team, Lester B. Morrison – his first publication. You can of course find out more about it there, although again I don’t think I’ll be buying.
As the first post on the blog on Dec 12 said, “This is a place to talk about good books (our own and others)” and Soth has given his own response to The Future of the Photobook – currently under discussion elsewhere – in the blog. But following the death last week of Larry Sultan, Soth has contributed a generous and thoughtful post, Larry Sultan, Pictures From Home.