Alec Soth’s *Advice for Young Artists* takes its title from a premise it quietly declines to fulfill. Between 2022 and 2024, Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States, and the photographs gathered here come from those encounters. The result is not a guide or a survey of student work but an unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life, and on photography’s uneasy relationship to time and ageing.

Published by MACK in 2024, the book moves between formal studies that evoke the classroom and less disciplined works of self-expression. Ambiguous stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotations and unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage among the students. The sequencing keeps instruction and introspection in tension; the instructional format serves, as in *Broken Manual*, as a spurious cover for provocation rather than pedagogy.

Suggesting Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, the work marks a new expansion of Soth’s practice and a vantage point twenty years after his first book. What might read as a study of the young artist becomes a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one. This is the book’s distinctive pressure: it treats youth and age as reciprocal conditions, with photography as the medium that records and distorts both.

For collectors, the appeal lies in this late-phase turn and its making: a debossed linen hardcover with tip-in, 72 pages, 26.6 × 27.3 cm, from MACK. It is a compact, carefully considered object in which Soth’s long-standing concerns—portraiture, narrative, the artifice of guidance—are reworked through a specific institutional setting and a wry conceptual frame.