Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programs across the United States. The work he produced during these visits is compiled in *Advice for Young Artists*. Despite its title, which might suggest guidance or wisdom, Soth’s work instead offers a sharp and unresolved contemplation on the process of creating art at various stages of life, and the interplay between photography, time, and aging. The images in this collection range from structured compositions reminiscent of a classroom setting to more chaotic expressions of personal creativity. The series features ambiguous scenes, found objects, and poetic portraits, interwoven with enigmatic quotes and incomplete ideas hastily written on Post-it notes. Soth himself occasionally appears among the students, a somewhat uncertain figure of wisdom in their midst.
Inspired by Walker Evans’s later Polaroid work, this new collection marks a significant development in Soth’s artistic journey, two decades after the release of his first book. Echoing the theme of *Broken Manual*, it adopts an instructional format as a misleading facade for deeper introspection and provocation. This project is as much an exploration of the young artist’s experience as it is a confrontation with the looming reality of becoming an older one.