Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life across the country. To aid his research, Soth took on the increasingly obsolete role of a community-newspaper journalist. From 2012 to 2014, he traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for The New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals, and community gatherings in search of human interaction in the era of virtual social networks. With Songbook, Soth stripped these images of their news context in order to highlight the fundamental yearning for connection. Fragmentary, funny, and melancholy, Songbook offers a lyrical portrayal of the tension between American individualism and the desire to come together.