The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It’s a gray November;
The leaves have all turned brown,
And all the birds of summer
Are packing up to leave town.

Drizzly gray November,
The year is winding down,
And in the sky the sun pales like an ember…

And so it goes –
The year draws to a close
Another year’s beginning.
And so it goes –
It won’t be long now, I suppose
‘Til I must sing my own November song.

Summer and travel. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford to get out of the Cities, to the cabin or "up north," summer and travel make an unbeatable combination. Of course, camera phones and digital cameras come along for the ride. Looking at the Museum of Russian Art's current show of Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii's work, it seems that photography and travel, too, make a hard-to-resist combination.

"Where is Brad Zellar?" you might ask, as his hiatus from The Rake has created quite a void. Happily, he's been busy promoting his new book, Suburban World: The Norling Photos, from Borealis Books.

Top photo: Fifi Chachnil; bottom photo: Cristina.

On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end of Twenty-Fourth Street. They came to see Niagara, the new series of photographs by Alec Soth, who lives in Minneapolis and works in a studio just over the border in St. Paul.

These annual exhibitions showcase new work from the recipients of one of the state's most coveted grants--and keep us up to date on the doings of some of the best local photographers. Last year's celebrated quartet was made up of Beth Dow, who made rich platinum prints of various types of manicured landscapes (pictured), and Tobechi Tobechukwu and JoAnn Verburg, who both explored portraiture--Tobechukwu with portraits of women whose children have died from crime-related violence, and Verburg by experimenting with scale, proximity, and props.

These kinds of “dialogues” can be iffy—what if the subjects simply don’t click, or, worse, kind of irritate each other?—but this looks to be an inspired pairing. Everyone wants to know what Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth is up to these days, since last year’s Whitney Biennial made him an art star the likes of which are not usually seen around here. And we can’t think of a better person to chat with him about that than Andrei Codrescu, the Baton Rouge resident, novelist, poet, NPR commentator, and all-around impressive yet accessible intellectual.

In America today, Jesus is pop culture’s King of Kings, a force in politics, film, music, and books. In the world of contemporary art, though, his presence is less established. While modern curators always seems to make room for dung-smeared Madonnas and crucifixes in urine, where are the works of genuine, unironic reverence? Not in Manhattan’s most influential galleries. Not in Artforum.

We're eager to see the newest work from this Minneapolis photographer since his Sleeping by the Mississippi portraits sent his career into orbit. Soth's vividness, like the doubletake we do to see our surroundings more clearly, often makes his human subjects appear to have been captured in the "happy place" of their imaginations. A boy in military garb rises from a bed of golden flowers; a young woman stands on a fog-blanketed prairie, alone but for a ghostly contingent of sheep, who float toward her from the mists.

We were surprised to open up Monday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin's article on religion in the workplace. Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We'd noticed Russell Shorto's feature, not only because it was a compelling cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.