Rodney Smith was a prominent photographer whose whimsical work invited comparison to that of surrealist painter René Magritte. Long acclaimed for his iconic black and white images that combine portraiture and landscape, Smith created enchanted worlds full of subtle contradictions and surprises. Using only film and light, his un-retouched, dream-like images are matched in quality by the craft and physical beauty of his prints. Mr. Smith was a man who cared deeply about sharing his vision of the world with humor, grace and optimism.
Biography
Rodney Lewis Smith (1947–2016) was born in New York City. He found his artistic inspiration while visiting the permanent collection of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during his junior year in college. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1970, he went on to earn a master’s degree in theology from Yale University, while minoring in photography under Walker Evans. Smith was looking for meaning in his life, and photography provided a way for him to express himself.
In 1976, he was awarded a Jerusalem Foundation Fellowship, which resulted in his first book, In the Land of Light. This three-month fellowship changed him profoundly, as he found nobility in a diverse mix of cultures and religions in the Middle East, where many people lived an 18th century existence in a 20th century world.
Having found his niche, Smith traveled throughout the American South, Haiti and Wales, making soul-searching portraits of workers and farmers, as well as capturing the magnificence of the landscape.
Influenced by the teaching and technical precision of Ansel Adams, Smith sought to perfect his own technique, narrowing his choice of camera, film, exposure, developer, and paper. He used light to edit and reveal his subjects, rendering them in a broad spectrum of tones, ranging from crisp white highlights to deep velvety shadows. Smith’s signature style emerged, making the world appear sharper and clearer, bringing order to chaos.
In the mid-1980s, Smith’s work caught the attention of art directors and magazine editors who commissioned him to create journalistic portraits of CEOs around the world. He insisted on being given complete access to his subjects as well as total creative freedom. Shooting pictures of these powerful men, on location, in their own personal environments, endowed them with a previously unseen humanity, and changed the nature of corporate portraiture.
The integration of figure and landscape was further strengthened when Smith co-authored The Hat Book in 1993 with creative director Leslie Smolan. This whimsical photo-essay on hats, contrasted the workers in an 18th century hat factory with hats as expressions of identity and fashion. Smith and Smolan married in 1990, building a lifelong creative partnership that was instrumental in helping Smith find his own unique vision.
By the mid-1990s, editorial clients included The New York Times, W Magazine, Vanity Fair, Departures and New York Magazine. Smith was immersed in shooting fashion for Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Ralph Lauren and Paul Stuart, among others. All sought to tap into his unique style, and his emerging affinity for spontaneity, humor and surrealism. “I trust my instincts to get to the heart of the matter. Once I find the right location and the right light, everything else follows from there.”
Throughout his life, Smith was passionate about the print as an artifact. “For me, the print is the creation, the purpose, the result of my endeavor.” Early on, he favored small silver gelatin prints mounted with large white mats. In the mid-2000’s, with the advent of archival pigment printing on watercolor paper, he finally embraced both color and large-scale printing with stunning results.
Rodney Smith died in 2016 at the age of 68. His images combine wit and elegance, a potent mix that could not have been created by any other photographer. His work continues to be shown at museums and galleries and collected by private individuals. The Estate of Rodney Smith is dedicated to preserving his archive and sharing it with audiences around the world who enjoy Smith’s signature aesthetic and whimsical sense of humor.
“In Smith’s enchanted world, balance produces beauty, laughter and whimsy dance hand in hand, and things are not always what they seem. The photographs offer a perfect blend of reverie and reality.”
ARTIST’S
STATEMENT
My creative process is intricately connected to how I examine my own life, how I got to know myself, how I drew clarity from my emotions and translated them into pictures. Taking photographs was my way of reconciling the mundane with the ideal, of reconciling my fears, and shifting from anxious loner to participant. It was with my camera that I began to find intimacy.
Today, a great deal of Western culture seems rooted in remoteness, anger, alienation, and squalor. I want people to see the beauty and whimsy in life, not its ugliness. I feel the need to reach out for its soul, its depth, and its underlying beauty. I represent a world that is possible if people act their best. It’s a world that’s slightly beyond reach, beyond everyday experience, but it’s definitely not impossible.
I trust my instincts to get to the heart of the matter. First, I find the location, then everything else follows. If you watched me work, you would see me move around, and suddenly stop when I’ve found the right spot to take a picture. It’s an intuition about proportion and scale, and how I am relating to the subject. It’s not an intellectual concept; it is an emotional concept. Composition is like rhythm in music—it’s where everything is in sync. It’s where the whole picture comes together succinctly and carefully.
I am meticulous in my craft. I expose and process the film by hand, slowly, and work to produce an exquisite artifact, the print. I labor to produce a thing of beauty. For me, the print is the creation, the purpose—the result of my endeavor.—rodney lewis smith
Chronology
1915
Sanford J. Smith is born to Charles and Mollie Smith in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. Charles is a coat manufacturer.
1918
Marion Rodnick is born to Samuel and Tessie Rodnick, also in Woodmere. Samuel is in the textile business.
1929
October 28: Stock market crash leads to the Great Depression.
1938
Sanford Smith marries Marion Rodnick.
Marion and Sanford Smith, Woodmere, Long Island, 1944. Photograph by Otto G. Buschke’s Studio
1941
The United States enters World War II.
1943
February 12: A daughter, Marianne, is born to the Smiths in Woodmere. During the war the Smiths live with Marion’s parents.
1947
December 24: Rodney Lewis Smith is born in New York City.
Rodney Smith at age two, 1949
1948
The Smiths move to 963 Allen Lane in Woodmere.
Ansel Adams publishes The Negative.
1950
Ansel Adams publishes The Print.
Rodney Smith’s copies of Ansel Adams’s technical manuals The Negative and The Print (1971 editions). Smith incorporated Adams’s practices into his own photography and into his teaching.
1951
Sanford Smith establishes the fashion company Modelia, Inc., with partner Gunther Oppenheim. In 1952 George Borg, owner of a knitting mill, allows Smith to use a fabric developed for paint rollers to make faux-fur coats. Borg calls the deep-pile fabric Borgana.
Rodney Smith attends the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Schools.
Model Dovima in an advertisement for Borgana coats, manufactured by Sanford Smith’s company, Modelia, Inc., 1955. Photograph by William Helburn
1955
1956
The Smiths move to a Georgian stone mansion on Monroe Lane in Woodmere.
Introduced to photography by a German caretaker employed in his parents’ household.
1957
Attends the private Woodmere Academy through 1962.
1958
The Smith mansion on Monroe Lane is featured in the October and December issues of American Home magazine.
1959
Travels to London, Paris, and St. Moritz with his parents.
1960
Beaumont Newhall publishes The Daybooks of Edward Weston.
1962
Receives a Kodak Retina Reflex III with a 50 mm Schneider lens from his father.
1962
Attends Avon Old Farms School, Avon, Connecticut through 1966.
1964
US combat troops are sent to fight in the Vietnam War. Military draft begins.
1965
Meets Mary-Kelly Busch, daughter of actress Teresa Wright and novelist Niven Busch, on a European student tour.
1966
Enrolls at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Sanford Smith’s alma mater.
1967
Visits the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he sees original prints by Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and W. Eugene Smith for the first time.
Rodney, age twenty, at home on Monroe Lane, Woodmere, with his mother, Marion, 1967
1968
Marries Mary-Kelly Busch in the apple orchard at the home of her mother, actress Teresa Wright, and her stepfather, playwright Robert Anderson, in Bridgewater, Connecticut.
Fashion designer Anne Klein with her husband, Matthew “Chip” Rubinstein, left, and business partners Gunther Oppenheim and Sanford Smith, right, 1964.
1968
Sanford Smith and Gunther Oppenheim cofound Anne Klein & Company with Anne Klein and her husband, Matthew “Chip” Rubinstein. Smith and Oppenheim also sign an agreement to sell Pierre Cardin’s ready-to-wear women’s fashions in the United States.
Henri Cartier-Bresson publishes The World of Henri Cartier‑Bresson.
1970
Receives a bachelor’s degree in English literature and religious studies from the University of Virginia.
Receives five hundred dollars from his brother-in-law, Stephen Harrison, to purchase a Leica camera.
1971
W. Eugene Smith creates Tomoko in Her Bath, Minamata, Japan.
1972
Smith and Mary-Kelly purchase a former sea captain’s house and barn in Clinton, Connecticut, and embark on renovation. Rodney decides to become a photographer and builds a darkroom on the property.
August 30: Sanford Smith dies suddenly at age fifty-seven; his fortune goes to his business partner, Gunther Oppenheim.
September 25: A son, Jonah, is born to Rodney and Mary-Kelly in New Haven, Connecticut.
Diane Arbus is given a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Sanford Smith with the family’s English sheepdog, Golly, at their home on Monroe Lane, 1957
1973
Smith receives a master of divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, New Haven, while also studying photography under Walker Evans.
Becomes a contributing associate of Magnum Photos.
US involvement in the Vietnam War ends.
1974
Smith begins serving as adjunct professor of photography at the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, for two years.
1976
Seventeen of Smith’s photographs appear in the Yale Alumni Magazine.
Smith receives a grant from the Jerusalem Foundation to serve as a fellow at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem, where he would photograph the people of Israel. Fellow attendees include violinist Isaac Stern, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, sculptor Alexander Calder, novelist E. L. Doctorow, and composer and writer Nicolas Nabokov.
1977
Photographs in the Mississippi Delta.
1979
Terence Falk becomes Smith’s first assistant and later his printer. Smith taught Falk photography at the University of Bridgeport in 1974.
1980
Smith lives and photographs in Wales.
Rodney Smith, Landscape, Wales, UK, 1980
1982
Serves as adjunct professor of photography at Yale University.
Smith lives and photographs in Haiti.
Marion Smith dies in New York City at the age of sixty-four.
1983
Smith’s book In the Land of Light: Israel, a Portrait of Its People, with an introduction by Elie Wiesel, is published by Houghton Mifflin, where Smith works with editor Nan A. Talese.
Smith visits Ansel Adams in Carmel, California.
Rodney Smith, Three Men, Old City, Jerusalem, Israel, 1976. In the tradition of Walker Evans, Smith traveled throughout Israel, the American South, Haiti, and Wales from 1976 through 1985, making soul-searching portraits of laborers and capturing the magnificence of the landscape.
1984
Photographs throughout the American South.
1985
Photographs in France.
Applies to become a full member of Magnum Photos.
Becomes a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar.
Begins taking short-term teaching assignments at the International Center of Photography, New York; the Maine Photographic Workshops, Rockport; and the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, New Mexico.
Rodney Smith teaching portraiture, Maine Photographic Workshops, 1988. Smith shared information about his technique as well as the cameras, film, developer, and paper he used but advised students it was more important to have something to say about the world.
1986
Smith’s marriage to Mary-Kelly ends. Their divorce is finalized in 1989.
1987
Smith enters the commercial photography world with an award-winning annual report for the H. J. Heinz Company, shooting environmental portraits of international CEOs.
Meets Leslie Smolan, cofounder of the design firm Carbone Smolan Agency, who hires him to shoot photographs for the New York Stock Exchange and Merrill Lynch.
Creates a series of photographs at the Bollman Hat Company, Adamstown, Pennsylvania.
Rodney Smith, Gary Comer, Dodgeville, Wisconsin, 1988. Commissioned by Leslie Smolan for the New York Stock Exchange
1988
Becomes a fellow at Timothy Dwight College at Yale University.
Makes portraits of faculty at Yale.
Applies for a Guggenheim grant to create a series of photographic portraits of the leaders of the world’s most important business organizations.
Begins using a Hasselblad camera with a tripod for most of his work. For horizontals or spreads, he uses a Mamiya 6-by-7-centimeter camera.
Smolan purchases property in Snedens Landing, New York. Begins renovation project with Smith, who moves his darkroom there from Clinton, Connecticut.
A stone-and-stucco house from the 1930s purchased by Smolan. Former owners included theatrical producer Dorothy Willard McCormick, set designer George Jenkins, and journalist Mike Wallace.
1989
Photographs in Jamaica.
Hired by Taxi Magazine for first fashion assignment.
Terence Falk establishes his own studio.
Sam Pettingill begins working for Smith as a master printer.
1990
Smith marries Leslie Smolan.
Photographs in Rome, Siena, and Porto Ecole, Italy.
1991
Begins shooting fashion assignments for luxury retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Creates Trees, Cumberland Island, Georgia.
John Szarkowski retires as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art.
1992
Smith is given a solo exhibition at the Witkin Gallery, New York.
1993
The Hat Book, a visual journey through the world of hats, conceived and designed by Smolan with photographs by Smith, is edited by Nan A. Talese and published under her imprint at Doubleday.
1994
November 20: A daughter, Savannah, is born to Smith and Smolan in New York.
Smith creates a campaign for Ralph Lauren.
December, 1994 – October, 1995: Creates the Line series (Airline, Hemline, and Skyline) for the New York Times Magazine, working with stylist Elizabeth Stewart and art director Janet Froelich.
Rodney Smith, Leslie and Savannah, Provence, France, 1995
1995
Photographs model Bernadette Jurkowski for the first time.
Lives and photographs in Provence, France.
Creates images for fashion brands including Kiton, Louis of Boston, and Alfred Dunhill.
1996
Terence Falk returns to work in the Smith studio.
Smith photographs covers for Neiman Marcus’s The Book, which debuts this year, working with creative director Georgia Christensen. The “magalog” (a cross between a catalog and a high-end fashion magazine) was mailed to customers and sold on newsstands.
August: Photographs in Chicago for Dayton Hudson.
Magazine and brochure covers featuring Smith’s photographs. Clockwise from upper left: W magazine’s “Men’s Portfolio,” 1993; Alfred Dunhill, 1994; W magazine’s “Men’s Portfolio,” 1995; Departures, 2010; New York City Ballet, 2000; and Neiman Marcus’s The Book, 1996.
1997
September: Creates Three Men with Shears No. 1, Reims, France.
1998
April: Celebrates his fiftieth birthday by traveling and photographing in Europe with his son, Jonah.
Rodney Smith, Polaroid Self-Portrait, Schoenbrunn 2000 Palace, Vienna, Austria, 1998. Smith’s son, Jonah, holds a Polaroid portrait of his father.
1999
Purchases adjacent property in Snedens Landing. Combines the properties and embarks on another renovation project including landscape design.
Creates Twins in Tree, Snedens Landing, New York.
Creates images to advertise the New York City Ballet.
Begins working with German fashion stylist Renate Lindlar.
2000
Solo exhibition, Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.
Smith is diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).
2001
Terence Falk resigns as Smith’s printer. He trains studio assistant Patricia Barrett as his replacement.
September 11: Almost three thousand people are killed in a series of attacks against the United States led by members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. The Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan are leveled.
November: Smith becomes the first photographer hired to create images for “The Year in Ideas,” a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, offering a catalog of “notions, inventions, conceptual swerves and philosophical leaps that mattered this year and may well continue to matter in years to come.” Smith’s photographs document concepts as diverse as Botox parties, super-slow exercise, gratitude visits, and drawings by blind people. He works with Kathy Ryan, director of photography, and Janet Froelich, creative director, on the first three issues: 2001, 2002, and 2003.
2002
Stills from commercials for Walgreens' “Searching for Perfect” campaign, directed by Rodney Smith, on location in Deerfield, Massachusetts; Hancock Shaker Village, Massachusetts; and Beaufort, South Carolina, 2002
2003
Solo exhibition Reverie and Reality at the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville.
Smith creates cover art for singer Cyndi Lauper’s album At Last.
Begins work on a book on Surrealism, titled Perceptions.
2004
Teaches a private student workshop in Paris.
2005
Publishes The Book of Books.
Solo exhibition Adam’s Dream at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah.
Rodney Smith during a trip to Bangkok for the opening of an exhibition of his photographs at Timothy Yarger Fine Art, 2006. Photograph by Leslie Smolan
2007
“On the Edge,” a fall fashion feature for New York magazine, is Smith’s first shoot with model and acrobat Reed Kelly.
Smith photographs a cover story on sleep for the New York Times Magazine.
Travels to Amalfi, Italy, to shoot a fashion story for Departures magazine, working with editor Richard David Story.
2008
The Great Recession begins in the United States with the bursting of the housing bubble and the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Smith begins hosting private student workshops in Snedens Landing (2008, 2011, 2013).
Creates Edythe and Andrew Kissing on Top of Taxis, New York, New York for New York magazine.
Provides cover art to W. W. Norton & Company for a reprint edition of the five-book series of Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith.
2009
Begins The End, a personal blog.
Begins first course of chemotherapy to treat CLL; receives subsequent treatments in 2011 and 2014.
Publishes the book The End, an oversize collector’s edition featuring twenty years of black-and-white photographs.
2010
Solo exhibition at the Museo De Teruel, Teruel, Spain.
Creates Saori on Sea Plane Wing, Dominican Republic.
2011
January 17: David with Binoculars Standing on Water, Sherwood Island, Connecticut (1997) appears on the cover of Time magazine.
Skyline, Hudson River, New York (1995) is exhibited at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York.
Smith creates photographs illustrating the concept of time for Real Simple magazine, working with creative director Janet Froelich.
Solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.
2012
Smith creates Reed Perched on the Top of Ladder with Binoculars, Snedens Landing, New York, which appears on the April 16 cover of Time magazine.
Photographs for Martha Stewart Weddings.
2013
Creates personal photographs at Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania.
Creates photographs illustrating the concept of balance for Real Simple magazine, working with creative director Janet Froelich.
2014
Creates personal photographs in Amenia, New York.
2015
March 6: The final blog entry for The End is posted.
2016
Smith provides cover art to Viking Books for A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
Publishes Rodney Smith: Photographs, the first book to include his color work.
December 5: Smith dies at home in Snedens Landing at age sixty-eight.
Cover of Amor Towles’s best-selling novel A Gentleman in Moscow with a photograph by Rodney Smith, 2016