![]() Smith’s career flourished as he began to develop his signature style. While these alluring images reflect the formal photographic trends of their time, they will also endure as timeless homages to his feminine ideal. One senses that rather than telling his models what to do, Smith paid close attention to what they did. ![]() His muse is delicate, fluid and always beyond reach. Feminist ideology and critique of the male gaze must be at least temporarily suspended to appreciate this body of Smith’s work. An unabashedly old-school romantic, his drive was to capture Her essence and ethereality. In these pictures Smith fulfilled contemporary fashion and style assignments with his personal visions of the Feminine Muse. His photographs of women tell a different story. Smith got beyond the formal pose and trappings of privilege and power, and created penetrating, intimate portraits. He attributed his successful results, first to his comfort level with these men-they were no different than the business associates of his father’s that he’d known as a child-and second, to his surprise, he found that he liked many of these CEOs, some of whom became his friends. Smith approached these captains of industry just as he had the coal miners in Wales-he humanized them. Heinz, a daunting task for any young professional. Upon his return to New York he landed his first major commercial assignment: a series of executive portraits for H.J. What came next could have proved disastrous, but didn’t. His socially conscious, penetrating portraits express the nobility we’ve come to accept as a given of the genre, but Smith’s sense of light, scale and composition, and his ability to reveal character, make these early portraits stronger than most of their kind. ![]() Smith portrayed the “common” people he encountered with an uncommon touch. A fellowship to work in Israel resulted in Smith’s first book, In the Land of Light, and he also lived and worked in Wales, Haiti and the American South. In his escape from privilege he set out for points unknown, traveling for years, seeking to understand the experience of others through his chosen medium. In those cases the humor is in our recognition of universal human behavior. In the history of photography there are humorous moments captured, such as Ruth Orkin’s little girl cheating at cards on the steps of a New York City apartment building, and Doisneau’s couple at Romi’s Paris shop window. In a photograph everything is visible all at once, at first glance there’s no element of surprise. Print cartoons need that perceptual pause between visual image and unpredictable written caption. Funny photographs are rare because there’s no pause between the setup and punch line. There’s Lartigue, some of Doisneau, the witty Elliott Erwitt and maybe Wegman. Humor is especially difficult to achieve in still photography. The picture not only amuses, it manages to make a statement about gardens, ladders, leaf-covered walls and, through the human gesture of the hand clasp, something about time, human curiosity and the simple pleasure of looking. The man’s body language is relaxed, as though he has all day for gazing. The focus is razor-sharp, the moment, perfectly still. The design and symmetry of the composition are critical, as is the flat light.
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