Through the lens of Twin Cities photographer Alec Soth, newlyweds, oilmen, homeless kids, and others become kings and queens of the everyday. His images could pass for stills from a Terrence Malick film, which is a pretentious way of saying that they’re bittersweet and cinematic and offer no easy answers. Galleries and museums like him. So does the New York Times Magazine, which frequently taps him for features. In 2011, he and his friend Brad Zellar—a writer whose book of found photos of 1960s suburbia partly inspired the Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man—started a conceptual newspaper called the LBM Dispatch, published by Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom Press. Here, they discuss the Three Valleys edition, which chronicles a trip they took to the Silicon, Death, and San Joaquin valleys last spring.

—Chris Clayton

THE BELIEVER: How did the LBM Dispatch come about?

ALEC SOTH: It was my birthday, and I called Brad and asked him to give me a present, and it was to do a newspaper assignment together. We picked up this community newspaper and chose this story about a runaway cat that had been living off a deer carcass near this freeway interchange. We had a blast chasing down that story.

BRAD ZELLAR: We started going around pretending to be a suburban newspaper photographer and writer. We had business cards and went to community events and Elks Lodges. We started following news stories and weird historical angles, going to town-hall meetings. It was fun finding out a way to work with the pictures. Sometimes it was kind of fictional—sort of David Lynch meets Lake Wobegon. Other times it was more documentary-style. We had so much fun that Alec said, “Let’s take this on the road.” And then we went to Ohio and did the first Dispatch.

BLVR: The novelist Richard Ford has praised the LBM Dispatch, comparing it to the collaborations of Walker Evans and James Agee. How do you characterize the project?

AS: It’s two guys out driving around, engaging with the world. Engaging with the real world is a form of journalism that is increasingly rare—and in that sense we’re doing a kind of journalism. But we’re not constrained by any traditional boundaries. There’s a whimsy to it—it just goes where it wants to go, which is in the spirit of road photography.

BZ: It’s a twenty-first-century snapshot of American culture and regional life. That’s kind of our model, but again, sometimes we create more of a mythical and dreamy feel and other times we tell the straight story. Three Valleys is sort of a combination of the two.

BLVR: What drew you to California for this edition?

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