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When it came time to assign a photographer to this past weekend’s cover story about the oil boom in North Dakota, Alec Soth was the obvious choice. He not only lives in the neighboring state of Minnesota, where he was born and raised, but he also has delivered strong covers for us in the past. He also is the type of photographer who loves wandering around with an open-ended assignment, capturing people in ordinary settings.

Soth’s first cover story appeared in 2004 (above left), the same year he published his first book, “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” a series of color portraits and landscapes taken during road trips along the river. Back then he traveled mostly alone and made pictures using an 8-by-10 camera. In 2006, he put out “Niagara,” about the famous honeymoon destination, and in 2010 “Broken Manual,” about men living off the grid. Here’s a selection of pictures from all three books:

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By 2006, Soth was also experimenting photographically, shooting digitally and making short films, including some for The Times’s Opinion pages. More recently, he has been printing The LBM Dispatches, which he has described as “an irregularly published newspaper of the North American ramblings of photographer Alec Soth and writer Brad Zellar.” So far, Soth and Zellar have issued dispatches from Ohio, New York and Michigan. Siri Engberg, the curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which in 2010 organized the first major survey in the U.S. of Soth’s pictures, says Soth is working like a “small-town reporter . . . with a camera ready to capture the ordinary things” and following in the road-tripping footsteps of Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston.

“From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America,” is currently on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

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