Ping Pong Conversataions: Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot

001_conversations_bI love making books, but I continually struggle with the issue of accessibility. For students and everyone else on a budget, my books are either too expensive or too hard to find. For awhile that problem was resolved with my exhibition catalog From Here To There, but now that book is out of print and escalating in price.

So it is enormously satisfying to announce the publication of my new book, Ping Pong Conversations: Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot (Contrasto). There are so many things I love about this book:

1) Nobody knows my work better than the Italian critic and curator Francesco Zanot. This book-length conversation is richer than any other interview I’ve ever done. Everyone who’s read it (a couple friends, mom & dad) loves it. It is a wide-ranging, unpretentious, funny and surprising. Francesco’s introductory essay is also a killer.

2) The book’s 78 photographs are wonderfully surprising. While a number of my best known photographs are in the book, there are tons of obscure pictures from my archive that aren’t online anywhere else. The printing is also rock solid.

3) The book is less than $20!!!! Buy the book at PhotoEye or an independent bookstore near you.


11 Replies to “Ping Pong Conversataions: Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot”

  1. Just ordered it! I saw your talk at UT and really appreciate how you work. The way you plan and execute your trips is so authentic and that absolutely comes through in your images. Beautiful work; I can’t wait to see your pop-up exhibit at the Ransom Center.

  2. I just bought the book via Photoeye from amazon. Looks like a good read on time for Christmas. Amazon was tagging it as “only 1 still available” and I grabbed it just in case. So much better I received a 15$ coupon for an earlier fuck up of Amazon so it costed me only 10 $ all in.
    Alec, is there any way to provide the link to the lecture mentioned by Thomas at UT if online?
    Or any other lecture that you think is worthy to watch.

  3. Glad I ordered mine when I did and thanks for producing great books at great prices.
    I subscribed to ‘postcards from america’ (and the ‘dispatch’ series) and was pleasantly surprised when my son returned to Australia from New York earlier this year with a copy of $wap Shop which publication I did not know about.

  4. Have read my copy here in England twice over. At a talk I gave at Plymouth University last year, I referred to the Auckland Project, a joint book of Alec’s with John Gossage. I was interested to read in the Ping Pong Conversations that my thoughts about that visit to Auckland were confirmed. The diary makes a great read, to get beneath the surface.

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