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:
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