Guest edited by the acclaimed photographer Alec Soth, Aperture's summer issue explores the dimensions and possibilities of dreams, journeys, and chance in photography. "Sleepwalking" covers a surprising array of images and stories from the Soviet-era Czech artist Emila Medova to Sophie Calle's discovery of an abandoned Parisian hotel to Soth's own photographs from his travels in the United States. In this issue, Jesse Dorris interviews Duane Michals about luck and fate, Marina Warner explores the enduring resonance of the figure of the sleepwalker, and artists including Etienne Courtois, Maja Daniels, and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. present surreal and imaginative new series. The Summer 2022 issue also introduces The PhotoBook Review, a new section for lively engagement with photobooks, featuring reviews of recent titles by Nona Faustine, Samuel Fosso, Oscar Monzon, and others.

Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth is one of the defining publications in the photobook era. First published by Steidl in 2004, it was Soth's first book, sold through three print runs, and established him as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice. This is the second printing of the MACK edition and includes two new photographs that were not included in the Steidl versions of the book. Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected 'third coast'. Soth's richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. 'In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures', writes Anne Wilkes Tucker in the original essay published in the book, 'Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.' Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. Sixteen years since the book was first published, the artist's lyrical view has undoubtedly acquired a nuanced significance - one in which hope, fear, desire and regret coalesce in the evocative journey along this mythic river.

Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist. Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.

Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens' poem "The Gray Room," Alec Soth's latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren't about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth's portraits and images of his subject's surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. "After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life. In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it's only to emphasize that these pictures aren't about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart." - Alec Soth Coincides with four solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Berlin. Includes interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara.