From Google to Hewlett Packard, photographer Alec Soth sets his sights on Silicon Valley and the businesses synonymous with it—right down to a local computer repair store. Throughout his time in the global technology center, the photographer acted upon the same enquiring impulse: “It’s mythical, but what is it? What’s the silicon? What’s the boundary of it? It’s like a fantasy place in some ways.” Yet what he found was decidedly less unusual than he expected. “It felt like a normal American place,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I had somehow crossed some line to Silicon Valley, with robots moving around.” The pictures form part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's offsite exhibition Project Los Altos, that also includes artists Mike Mills, Spencer Finch, Chris Johanson and Jessica Stockholder, and include the black-and-white photograph of the garage within which Google first started. Visiting the internet giant's headquarters made a particular impression on Soth. “It was like entering a nation within a nation—I felt like I should show my passport,” he adds. “To me, Google is both funny and scary. There is something innocent about it—the front page has this childlike quality—but it’s so incredibly powerful.”