RODNEY SMITH
RODNEY SMITH
On my bookcase is a small, beautifully-crafted compendium of photographs, called The Book of Books. Inside its red cloth cover are 425 pages of monochrome prints accompanied by witty commentary and fabulous graphic design. It’s humorous, charming, and classy: quintessential Rodney Smith.
I enjoy Smith’s photographs. They are clever, serene, fantastical, and surreal. In his artist statement, Smith explained, “Today, a great deal of Western culture seems rooted in remoteness, anger, alienation, and squalor. I want people to see the beauty and whimsey in life, not its ugliness. I feel the need to reach out for its soul, its depth, and its underlying beauty.” His photographs are a welcome perspective: his “determination to find a small yes and overcome the great big “No.”
Two helpful sources for this post were first, Rodney Smith’s website, especially the blog he kept from 2009-2015. The second is the LinkedIn course “Narrative Portraiture: On Location in New York with Rodney Smith,” by Chris Orwig. Orwig interviews Smith, tours Smith’s home, and takes his portrait. Both sources are highly recommended (by me) if you want to engage in a deeper dive into the man and his work. The quotes below are taken from these sources.
Rodney Smith was born in 1947 in Manhattan, New York. During his graduate studies in Theology at Yale University, he said, “I absolutely knew I wanted to be a photographer.” For years, this was a difficult path: “I was continually rejected for my work and my life choices,” he said. “The daily routine was a call from my mother stating her disappointment in me for choosing such a useless occupation.” For the first fifteen years of his career, he was his own client, then found commercial success with corporate giants like Northrup, Ralph Lauren, Neiman Marcus, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. His career in portraiture and fashion spanned 45 years. He died in 2016, at age 68 years, at his home in New York.
Smith published five photo books: In the Land of Light (1983), The Hat Book (1993), The Book of Books (2005), The End (2009), and Rodney Smith Photographs (2016), as well as many prints. He paid close attention to the quality of his prints and books. Smith subscribed to the philosophy of his mentor, W. Eugene Smith, who said, “the print is the completed photograph.” “The whole reason I’m a photographer,” said Rodney Smith, “is to create an artifact…. I absolutely care about the final print.” He worked almost exclusively with film, and mostly in black and white.
When a photograph is committed to paper, it becomes an object and gains permanence. Viewing a printed photograph is a different experience than seeing it on-screen.
Photography, adds Smith, is like music: each photograph has cadence, symmetry, scale, and proportion. Discordant music, like discordant photography, is unsettled and unresolved, “lost in so many ways.” It fights you, frightens you, shakes you down. “Maybe I live in the wrong era,” he observed. Smith’s work is “about putting things in the right place,” rejecting chaos, embracing harmony and classical beauty.
I often think about the relationship between music and photography. Music is what I learned before; photography is what I’m learning now. Both are biographical, and reflect taste, style, opinion, and value. Discord, at least in Western music is unstable; this conflict that gives music its forward drive toward resolution. We need resolution; the alternative is exhaustion. If photography is only about discord and conflict, we are lost. I’m grateful for Smith’s calmness, “reconciliation and resolution.”
In noticed, in the back of Smith’s The Book of Books, an index. Maybe it is intended to help readers locate pages, as indexes often do, but I found it helpful in a different way. Presented as little thumbnails, I saw the compositions of Smith’s photographs more clearly, a pattern I had missed when they were larger, each photo on its own page. Size and organization make a difference. If I want to see form at its simplest, little prints might be the way to go.
“Pretty much all the light I ever do is directional,” said Smith. “Flemish painting was really important to me in how things were illuminated, how they use porticos and doorways and entryways as a light source.”
I like to see how other photographers use light. Light is integral to a photograph’s aesthetic.
I have a hundred more lessons-learned-from-Rodney-Smith, but I’ll conclude with a lesson-learned-from-Inge-Morath, which she taught to Rodney Smith: “Look, if you are good,” she said, “there is always room.”
Room on my bookcase, and room in the world.