Men ballroom dancing on their own, lone figures dwarfed by the desert, and the last snow globe repairman ... with his sad pictures punctuated by heartwarming lyrics from golden oldies, Alec Soth shows how fear overtook hope in everyday America

In 2000, the US academic Robert D Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. His thesis was that Americans had become increasingly insular, disconnected from family members, friends and neighbours and disinterested in joining clubs or social groups. Individualism had replaced community and though, for instance, more Americans were visiting bowling alleys than ever before, many were doing so alone.

Bowling Alone is one of two starting points for Alec Soth’s Songbook. The other is the canonical Great American Songbook – which is not a book at all but a yardstick for old-fashioned, well crafted lyrics and melodies composed by the likes of Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart and Johnny Mercer and sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald.

Soth’s Songbook is a lyrical meditation on community and its antithesis – the American urge for individualism. “I wanted to adopt a musical approach to the arrangement of the pictures,” says Soth. “It’s a journey across the United States, punctuated by quotes from classic songs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children of Eden. Maplewood, Minnesota. © Alec Soth 2015, courtesy of Mack

As such, Songbook revisits themes explored in his previous books, Sleeping By the Mississippi, Niagara and the rare-as-hen’s-teeth Broken Manual, all of which evoke an America in which individuals often seem lost or estranged from mainstream society (if, indeed, there is such a thing any more). Like Soth’s 2012 book, Looking For Love, which explores the way people try – and fail – to connect with each other in an increasingly atomised, technologically driven world, Songbook is a social exploration conducted in sombre black and white. It opens with a single portrait of a man dancing in an empty room, followed by a verse from Cole Porter’s classic song Night and Day. On the opposite page is a group portrait of girls and one older woman linking hands, their eyes closed in prayer. They are performers in a production of the Christian musical Children of Eden, from Soth’s homestate of Minnesota.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest St Alphonsus Church, Brooklyn Centre, Minnesota, by Alec Soth 2015. Courtesy of Mack

The church remains a fulcrum for exuberant community activity, as the opening images show. In one, a young besuited guitarist from Lil Jay and the Spiritual Boys whips up a congregation, while in another, a young girl wearing shorts dances opposite an elderly priest. Then comes the first jolt: a crowd of foam-covered revellers at a rave in the Crazy Legs Saloon in Watertown, New York – the sacred giving way to the profane.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crazy Legs Saloon. Watertown, New York. © Alec Soth 2015, courtesy of Mack

Soth is always a mischievous onlooker. In one picture, a lone man walks across a deserted square. Shot from above, he seems to be trying out an old-fashioned dance step, as if imagining himself in a musical. The caption reads: “Facebook, Menlo Park, California.” As metaphors go, it’s a good one for the faux communities the likes of Facebook and Instagram promote. The book moves between the sombre and the surreal: an oil-smeared worker in North Dakota sits forlorn in a lunar landscape, as a man addresses a gathering at the Optimists Club in Bloomington, Minnesota. Stranger still is Soth’s portrait of a hooded black man in a thicket of thorns beneath a glowering sky. It could be a still from a sci-fi movie, but the caption reads: “Howard in the asparagus garden. Detroit, Michigan.”

Throughout, the monochrome tones reflect the tenor of the work, which encompasses melancholy, nostalgia and the abiding unreality of small-town America. The spirits of Robert Frank and William Eggleston haunt Songbook, as well as Larry Sultan’s seminal series Evidence, which Soth cites as a touchstone. A woman looking startled in her car is pure Eggleston, minus the rich colours. There is black humour here, too: a baby howls in fear as its parents pick a Martian-looking doll from a cot full of identikit toys in Babyland General Hospital, Cleveland, Georgia. I’m with the baby. In another Martian image, a man stares though a glass sphere that makes him resemble a human fly. This is “The last snow globe repairman, Northfield, Minnesota.”

Soth made many of these photographs while on assignment for what he calls his “little homegrown newspaper”, the LBM Dispatch (Little Brown Mushroom is his celebrated website, blog and publishing house). With the writer Brad Zellar, he “crisscrossed the country, collecting a compendium of American faces, voices and places”, which he then self-published in seven different dispatches. “I wanted that nostalgic element,” he elaborates. “That sense of something lost that is also anxiety for the way things once were. That’s really the dynamic – the tension between the communal and the individual, and the anxiety that attends the decline of community.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lil’ Jay J and the Spiritual Boys. Rochester, New York. © Alec Soth 2015, courtesy of Mack

To this end, Songbook culminates with a series of dark, very anxious images: a line of uniformed, Stetson-hatted prison guards marching in the dark towards an execution at Huntsville Prison, Texas; the remains of a wooden house in Grand Junction, Colorado. By the final pages, the American landscape seems haunted – misty, indistinct and all but deserted. In the last shot, a lone figure looks dwarfed by the vast desertscape of Death Valley.

The final quote comes not from Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter but the Romanian dramatist of the absurd, Eugene Ionesco: “The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does not more than reflect and interpret very imperfectly ... it is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.” Songbook, even with its mischievous undertow, would seem to confirm Ionesco’s assertion and reassert Alec Soth’s position as the foremost visual chronicler of contemporary America’s nostalgias and fears.