I have news which might come as a surprise to you, since most of you know me primarily as a bookseller.
In the early 1970s while a graduate student in American Studies at Yale, I became passionate about photography and through Alan Trachtenberg was fortunate to meet Walker Evans and participate by invitation in the Trumbull College Seminar he offered to undergraduate students at Yale in 1971-2. After my first exhibition in the Spring of 1974 at Archetype Gallery in New Haven (with Paul Caponigro), I set out in the summer of 1974 on to explore America with my two twin lens reflex cameras, a project which lasted three months and covered some twenty-six states. The project resulted in two further one-man exhibitions (Stetson University Art Gallery, Deland, Florida, and Yale Cross Campus Library) and publications of my photographs in various journals through the 1970s. I eventually had to put photography on the back burner in order to make a living, establishing my business, R.W. Smith Bookseller in 1975, with specialties in rare and out-of-print reference material on American art and photography.
I have long nurtured the ambition of publishing this work in book form, and I’m happy to announced that my book: “In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: American Photographs 1974”, with essays on the photographs by Richard H. King and Alexander Nemerov, will be published in the Spring of 2014 by Peter Falk of Falk Art Reference, Madison, Connecticut, in conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts scheduled to open in the Summer 2014. Richard King, Professor Emeritus, University of Nottingham, is a leading scholar of Southern Culture; as author “A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (Oxford UP, 1982) and as a long time friend since our graduate school days together at Yale, is perfectly suited to discuss my work within the context of American and Southern Studies. Alexander Nemerov, Professor of Art History, Stanford University and author of a number of challenging interpretations of American art, film and photography (Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War; The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood; Celluloid Symphonies; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures; and others), plans to focus on a single individual image and discuss it in the context of other photographs in the sequence.
Most of the members will remember Peter Falk as the Founder, Publisher, and Editor of a series of indispensable art reference books in the 1980s and 1990s, including indexes to some of the major American serial exhibitions such as the Carnegie Internationals, the Whitney Annuals and Biennials, the Corcoran, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, and others. His Who Was Who in American Art received the Wittenborn Award for the outstanding art reference book of 1985. Peter Falk now publishes under the imprint of Falk Art References, which since its founding has published various monographs and exhibition catalogues on American artists. My book will be his first imprint on photography, though Peter has been very much involved with photography over the years; his Photography Art Market, first published in 1981 prior to the founding of Sound View Press, was one of the first compilations of photography auction records. In fact Peter and I first met through an exhibition I organized of “Four photographers: Beyond Documentary” at the John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven in 1979, a non-profit gallery established in 1959 by the John Slade Ely Trust where I later served a ten year term as chief curator from 1986 to 1995. Both Peter and I have exhibited at numerous ARLIS conferences since the early 1980s, so some of the longer term members may remember us from these conferences. I had to curtail exhibiting for nine years from 2000 to 2009 due to responsibilities in caring for an aging parent, but I exhibited at the Boston conference in 2010, where I presented a collection of photographically illustrated children’s books and published a catalogue in conjunction with the display.
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is promoting the exhibition on its website. A prospectus and fully illustrated checklist of the 52 photographs in the exhibition can be accessed by clicking on the following link:
http://www.mmfa.org/uploadedFiles/Exhibitions/Traveling_Exhibitions/MMFA_RaymondSmith_prospectusweb.pdf
The Museum is seeking additional venues for the exhibition through 2015. If, upon viewing the checklist, any of my ARLIS colleagues with museum affiliations feel it worth recommending to your respective curators, please do so. The exhibition is available through the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts at a very reasonable cost (as noted on the website). Arrangements for additional venues should be made with Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Curator, Michael Panhorst, who has organized the exhibition, but I would myself appreciate hearing of any interest or developments in this regard as well as in personal responses to the photographs.
Raymond Smith
R.W. Smith Bookseller
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