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| Rodney Smith |
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Much is known about Rodney Smith.
He studied photography under Walker Evans at Yale and has a degree in Theology. His photographs frequently reference other artists, most notably the surrealist painter Rene Magritte. His images carefully balance the elements of design and spontaneity while blurring the lines between real and surreal. His work is represented in every important gallery across the globe. He’s won countless awards. He recently released a new book. He loves black-and-white. And he has a thing about hats.
But here’s one thing you may not know: Though Rodney Smith is fundamentally an optimistic person, on the day we speak he’s feeling a little less so.
“I love photography just as much as I always have, but it’s changed,” he says. “I think what I’m really lamenting is popular culture. I just don’t identify with it. I think we’ve made a left turn, or we came to a Y in the road, and as a nation and a culture we’ve gone off in the wrong direction.”
He adds that it’s not just America, “I think it’s maybe the world. And it’s not just photography. It’s music. And dance. Art has isolated itself, removed itself from the emotional core that moves people.”
A Small Voice in a Big World
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“Truly great art,” Smith continues, “be it in the Renaissance or the 19th century or any period — speaks from the human heart, the emotional core. That’s what drives great picture making, and that’s why somebody can look at a painting from 300 years ago and still resonate with it — because it’s speaking on a level that’s not about the culture. It’s about something else, some psychological aspect or deeper emotional thing. And I think that is totally lacking in most modern photography. I look at most photographs and think that they are unhappy, desperate, empty pictures. They are not aspirational. They do not make me look at this world and say, ‘Wow. It’s wonderful to be a part of it.’ As Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, ‘They’re not saying yes to life.’”
In contrast, Smith aims to foster a sense of serenity and well-being. "My interest is not in what is new or fashionable, but rather what endures, and is graceful, stylish, and beautiful," Smith says. “My job is to make something that is not only satisfying to me but has something to say to the world at large. And that has always been the trick. My job is to find some order and meaning and purpose in the world.”
Like Gene Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, and Irving Penn, Smith says he is still trying to make pictures that will lead people away from this malaise he finds everybody in. “But I’m a very small voice in a very big world,” he says.
It is perhaps this reflection that was the impetus for his latest book, “The End.”
Fast Forward to The End
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It was two years in the making, involving an army of graphic designers and master printmakers, and over 100 stunning images with topics ranging from time, God, death, feminine mystique, surrealism, and ocular devices to mansions, pranks, and Quakers run amok.
It is The End, a compilation of Smith’s work over the last 15 years, replete with brain-teasing text and a stern warning, “Please consult your physician or therapist before perusing its contents.”
And did we mention it’s big?
“This is my fourth book. The last two have been very small books — hopefully not in substance, but in physical size,” Smith notes. “But since we’ve been making these huge prints, people have loved seeing my pictures very big. My wife said we need to make a big book, so this book is a very big book. The trim size is 16 by 20 inches, and the images look great.”
Indeed they do. Each of the 110 photographs in the limited-edition, 196-page book blurs the boundary between imagination and reality. And within the surreal, dream-like world that Smith creates, viewers can discover singular beauty, sly wit, and even poetic truth.
More important, each of the photographs raises questions — more questions than they answer. Which is exactly his point. “I think if a photograph answers the questions, it’s not worth looking at. You’ll have a fleeting glance and that’s fine, but you won’t go back to it.”
Smith adds, “As for the title, I don’t know if it’s the end of this type of pictures for me, or if I’ll continue. ”
To which we say, “Yes, Mr. Smith, please do continue.”
A Love/Hate Relationship
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“Photography is the greatest gift that has been given to me,” Smith declares. “It’s helped me in so many ways. It’s given me the means to make a living and do what I want to do and go out in the world and meet people. It’s also helped me understand myself as a human being.”
And yet, he adds, “My feelings about photography are exactly the same today as when I was 20. That is, I have a love/hate relationship with making pictures.” Looking at pictures is one thing, he qualifies, “But making pictures — making pictures for me is hard, hard work.”
It’s not the physical work, he assures us. It’s the emotional work. “There’s this part of me that loves photography enough to go through the energy it takes to really make pictures,” he explains. “And there’s part of me that is happy to be a gardener. I have this ambivalence about it, but I keep doing it and I still love it and when it works, it’s completely satisfying.”
The difficulty lies in finding the right locations — the ones with the distinctive architecture and landscape features that will properly frame his vision.
“That is an extremely tedious and difficult process for me,” he says. “Ninety percent of the locations I look at I reject. It’s a very selective process for me and over 40 years, even though I’ve hired many, many location scouts over the years and once in a while I get lucky, for the most part, people are not able to get locations I want. They get close, but this process of looking for locations is exhausting for me and it always has been. Once I find the location, the fun starts. The location is this huge inspiration for me. That’s why I never would shoot in the studio. I have no interest in being in some container with no windows. The world around me is my inspiration and I need to be a part of it. I need to find a location that is inspiring to me, and that process is just very, very hard and emotionally exhausting.”
When asked how he knows if the location is right, he says, “When I come to a location and all of a sudden there’s an emotional response. All I want to know is that I can shoot pictures here. I don’t want to know what the pictures are going to be because the process of making the pictures is the old-fashioned one of exposing everything; it’s dependent on the model or the clothes or the weather or his or her feelings, my feelings, what time of day it is. I just let the process evolve. I get an obscure pleasure from becoming one with the environment.”
For some, not knowing what you’re making five minutes before you make it could be a problem. Not Smith. “If I scout this location and it’s two o’clock on a beautiful afternoon and I go back to shoot at six o’clock in the morning and it’s raining, I like it. I like trying to figure it all out and making it all work. I just trust my instincts. It’s my emotional response that drives it.”
Committed to Black-and-White
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Smith once said that black-and-white has more color than color. That intrigued us, so we asked him to elaborate.
“Black-and-white is like the architecture of something,” he says. “It’s down to the core, the emotional core. It’s like the girders of a building. It’s right to the essence of the experience. That’s important. But more important, emotionally it’s been much more powerful than color to me. Why this is I’m not sure, but I think it’s because of our visual acumen. Color is about the surface of things. It can be really quite beautiful and delicate and wonderful in its own way, but it’s a different thing.”
When he shoots 35 mm, or when there’s not enough light, Smith opts for KODAK PROFESSIONAL TRI-X Film. “There’s something about the granularity of that film and the way it responds to processing that’s just wonderful. You know the old aphorism, ‘A change is not necessarily an improvement.’ I think that it would be hard to improve upon those films. The thing about a photograph or illustration is that you’re taking this three-dimensional world, which is full of relationships and depth and you’re qualifying it down to this piece of paper, which is a difficult thing to do — to keep the emotions, to keep the power and density in this two-dimensional thing that was recorded from a three-dimensional place. I think that both of those films in their own way help somebody in the process of doing that.”
Smith adds that having shot black-and-white for 40 years, it may be actually more to his liking than ever before. His favorite film, depending on the lighting situation, is KODAK PROFESSIONAL PLUS-X 125 Film. “I think it’s an amazing film,” he says. “The grain is very minimal and the tonalities are smooth and wonderful. It’s a difficult film to control, but it’s got this inherent contrast that I really love. So when the situation is right, it’s my film of choice.”
| In Smith's Camera Bag: [ Back to top ] |
KODAK PROFESSIONAL PLUS-X 125 Film
When people say black and white, this is what they mean.
When you want the crisp whites, even grays, and the density of true black to blossom, KODAK PROFESSIONAL PLUS-X 125 Film delivers.
PLUS-X 125 Film offers a combination of sharpness and fine grain that makes it the ideal film for beautifully printable negatives in moderate-to-bright light.
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KODAK PROFESSIONAL TRI-X Films
The world’s best selling black-and-white film.
This classic black-and-white film allows for maximum pushability when you need it, while its wide exposure latitude lets you leverage even the most challenging lighting situations. And the distinctive grain structure adds a level of realism as dramatic and profound as each subject.
TRI-X Film. Truly timeless black-and-white.
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