‘I had a blast!’ The great photographer Alec Soth on why he went back to art school

‘I really wanted to do a book of nude self-portraits,” says Alec Soth. “For better or worse, I’m just an inward-looking photographer.” So why didn’t he? “Photography,” he explains, “means going out into the world and interacting with it.”

That is certainly what has made Soth such a revered photographer. The American has shot naked lovers and newlyweds visiting Niagara Falls, monks and survivalists holed up in remote mountain cabins, and the residents of fading US small towns. But instead of turning the camera on himself in the buff, for his new project Soth spent two years travelling across America, capturing undergraduates studying art at 25 universities. The result is his latest book, Advice for Young Artists .

I would try to just wander around and pretend I was a student

Despite the tantalising promise of its title, it’s not quite what it seems. Beyond a few gnomic quotes and self-help Post-its (threaded in, Soth says, so that people feel they “get their money’s worth”) the book is a mix of bittersweet longing, melancholy and wry observations, from the perspective of an ageing artist in pursuit of his fabled mojo. “As is typical for me, it didn’t start this way at all,” says Soth, 55, speaking by phone from the US east coast, where he’s currently teaching a residency course. (“There’s one guy here who’s my age, who retired two years ago as a dentist, and his photography’s on fire. I’m like, ‘Should I retire and become a dentist?’”)

In the beginning, Soth wanted to photograph both young and older artists. “Then I realised all the old artists were stand-ins for me. And I didn’t want to photograph them.” So he focused on young undergraduates who are “really new to it – they have that bubbling enthusiasm. I was reflecting on whether I could ever feel that again. I’m not old, but it’s coming – my kids are leaving now. I’m always thinking about how to recharge my creativity, how to stay fresh.”

Soth contacted art programmes across the US, offering classes in exchange for access. He didn’t interact much with the undergraduates, though: “I was just trying to be in the proximity of their energy, I guess.” The book’s photographs are a mix – from portraits of students (some choreographed by Soth) to artworks in progress in cluttered studios. Sometimes the viewpoint is close-cropped and intimate, catching inspirational quotes stuck up wonkily on walls. At other times, he moves back, making the viewer more aware of his distance from it all, showing classes absorbed in work. It’s a colourful, chaotic and celebratory cacophony: a paean to the unrestrained joy of creating, with an air of wistfulness.

Some of the images capture artworks that might make cynics wince. The generic conceptual sculptures include a chunky pile of breeze blocks draped in a tangle of cables. There’s a taxidermy mouse in a glass case, too, as well as a “mind map” with the words “ego”, “self” and “subjectivity” scrawled across the paper. An enlarged closeup photograph of labia sits on a stool. At times it feels like a checklist of art school cliches – but Soth’s aim wasn’t to mock. “What I love is that they’re not doing that jaded thing, being that person who knows too much and goes, ‘Oh, a mannequin, that’s so cliche!’”

In one deceptively simple image, a young woman sits straight-backed on a high chair, apparently posing for a self-portrait – the kind of self-portrait with a long cable release that is a rite of passage for any photography student. In fact, Soth took the picture and appears in it, reflected in the smeared glass of the mirror propped against the wall. “I thought, ‘Why not embrace that youthful way of looking at yourself?’ That’s the same thing I wanted to do with this project.”

Soth had an interesting approach when he arrived at each new university. “I would try to just wander around and pretend I was a student. It was kind of unusual – but I had a blast.” While role-playing a teen, he would work on his own images in classrooms, setting up still lifes, experimenting with new tools and techniques – there’s a lot of stacking going on in the images, which were shot on a digital camera, creating their sumptuous depth of field.

Despite being a master of tricky techniques, Soth puts aside his decades of experience (and accumulated neuroses) to try to see with the eyes of an ingenue, looking bright-eyed at a world still full of possibilities. “When you’re young, you want to dive into something – that is the whole thing, that’s everything. The end result is going to fade. Nothing is going to last. What matters is the process. I’m trying to feel that again.” Did he manage it? “I did, yeah – I had remarkable moments in classrooms, when I would lose myself in the work, where everything would fall away and I wasn’t worrying about what people would think. But later, I’d go back to my hotel and my anxious self.”

One of the conceptual linchpins for the project was Walker Evans’s Polaroids, taken towards the end of his career, just after he discovered the format. “He became like a kid again and was really excited. He was also hanging around young people, teaching and sort of vampirically sucking their energy. And he took these pictures that are incredible. They’re pictures of himself and he’s very broken down. They touched me deeply. You can feel his enthusiasm, but also his decay. I’m not as old as he was. I’m not like him – but that’s the feeling I was after.”

The work is also underpinned by Soth’s self-deprecating humour, directed at the absurdity of ageing, and his own attempts to rekindle the feeling of youth. “I have been frustrated with the way my work has been understood,” he says. “That’s my fault. But I really want humour. I want to allow paradoxes.” The book’s cover image is a drawing of Soth by his intern, a student at a local art college. He admits he’s embarrassed that he asked her to draw him. “I wanted to embrace that feeling of cringe. I feel the cover and the title are very cringey.”

It’s not the first time Soth – known for his sumptuous and poetic documentary works such as Niagara – has used unconventional methods. He once ran a summer camp for “awkward storytellers” and set up an “art school on wheels”, giving workshops to teens on a Winnebago.

In 2010, Soth published Broken Manual, a guide “for men to run away from their lives”. Both it and Advice for Young Artists reflect his anxieties about ageing. “I’m making fun of myself,” he says. “I think it’s funny to have a midlife crisis. There’s that feeling in middle-age of trying to hold on – Maybe I could dye my beard! But then it’s like, ‘Well, nothing can be done. I’m going down this road. It’s death and decay.’” In one symbolic picture, Soth makes another fleeting cameo – handing a wilting flower to a young photographer whose Leica hangs around his neck.

One night, Soth went to dinner with some of the students and a professor. As they were leaving, one earnest pupil turned to Soth and implored: “Can you please just give us one piece of advice?” Soth says: “That’s exactly the problem! I realised how lame it was to say I can’t give advice, but advice has all this weight attached to it and it always sounds empty. It’s meaningless. You just have to keep going.”

Soth is nervous about how the book will be received. When the title was first announced online, someone commented: “Oh, this wannabe rock star.” Another added: “Sure, his best work is behind him, but leave him alone!” Does such feedback bother him? “As I’m getting older, the power of the ego is waning. If I was an ageing musician and had to go and play only my greatest hits at casinos, that would crush me. I’d never want that in a million years. So if I make something experimental but I’m not beloved for it, I’m OK.”

There is one nude portrait in the book: a male figure just visible off to the side. His face is obscured by a large spotlight that illuminates a classroom chair and blankets. Is that a hidden nude Soth self-portrait after all? “Yes,” he says. “It was a kind of callback to a headless nude self-portrait in Niagara. I had to be quick and sneaky to take that photo.”

• Advice for Young Artists is published by Mack