Wondrous Transformations: Photographs of Michael A. Smith
". . . as I move the camera around, the world comes and goes, flattening itself into pictures. Wondrous transformations often occur—small details can appear as landscapes, and vast landscapes are sometimes diminished."
—From a 1978 statement by the artist
[Sadly, Michael A. Smith passed away in 2018. This exhibition was originally mounted in 2010, during Smith's lifetime, thus the exhibition texts discuss Smith's work in the present tense.]
Michael A. Smith, born in 1942 in Philadelphia, is a self-taught photographer who was originally drawn to the medium after seeing a television documentary about Edward Weston in 1965. As he began to experiment with taking pictures, Smith came to understand that the camera could do more than simply document elements of the real world, but could also transform these elements into aesthetic objects. Captivated by the clarity and detail that could be obtained with contact prints, he began to use view cameras early in his career. Smith chose the path of "straight" photography - he does not crop or enlarge his images. When he wants to make larger images, he uses a larger format camera. The gelatin silver prints in this exhibition are all made either with an 8 x 10 inch view camera or an 8 x 20 inch view camera.
Smith's earliest photographs were made close to home and concentrate on the details of his environment, revealing an interest in abstraction and all-over texture. In the mid-1970s Smith began to travel to the American West and shifted his focus to encompass sweeping landscapes of uninhabited landscape. In most of these images, Smith excludes the line of horizon, thus maintaining his concern with the textural qualities of the land.
While on a picture-taking trip in 1978, he began to use the 8 x 20 inch view camera. Puzzled at first about what types of photographs to make in this new format, he found a book that represented bird songs with graphs that showed the progression of notes and intervals across time. Smith realized that he wanted to make photographs "as beautiful as a bird song", and he began to look for similar all-over patterns in the landscape. In composing his pictures he had always been as concerned with the edges as with the center of the frame and had held a preference for a "dense and tangled" texture that would compel the viewer to scan the whole picture from end to end. Thus the inspiration of bird song, together with his interest in abstract form, led Smith to create these new documents of the American landscape.
In the 1980s Smith began to receive commissions to photograph urban environments in Toledo and New Orleans and elsewhere, but he was still drawn back again and again to grandeur of the countryside. In the last ten years, he has journeyed beyond the United States to record the patterns of the Tuscan landscape, all the while revealing "wondrous transformations".
