Rodney Smith, “Don jumping over hay roll, NO. 1, Monkton, Maryland”, 1999

#somereallygoodones, #rodneysmith, #latentfire

“One summer afternoon I came home and found all the umbrellas sitting in the kitchen, with straw hats on, telling who they are. “

-Carl Sandburg, “Rootabaga Stories”, 1922

Rodney Smith, “Don jumping over hay roll, NO. 1, Monkton, Maryland”, 1999

Photographer Rodney Smith is like a great composer/musician/conductor — seasoned and practiced — who performs masterfully. Smith talks in musical terms: rhythm, resonance, form. As a visual artist he is a tuning fork with perfect tone. Om. The music of and in the work distinguishes it.

And think capriccio, a mix of real and fantasy.

As clear and on point as Smith’s work seems, it is as if there is something withheld; something is elusive. This is what makes the images peculiarly appealing and why we are drawn to them. The photographs are great looking and spirited, even enlightened. In the most direct terms, they are very well done.

Smith refers to “unknowables” in his work, and he means chance. Technically we don’t see anything that has not been fully considered, but he does. He exists outside the work. Ironically it’s his “otherness” that gives the work resonance.

At the center of so many of these landscapes, there are a figure or two, the subject or principal player, highlighted by a corona of light with the illumination coming from the beyond. The event has transcendence. In the best of these, this central character is confronting a dilemma, an existential obstacle to be sorted out, sometimes by bumping up against it and sometimes by leaping over it.

This is the heart and soul of Rodney Smith.

These photographs may seem simple. They’re knotty. We feel a very strong, present and somewhat inscrutable unconscious at work.

Observers, including Smith, use “whimsy” to describe his sensibility. Whimsy is “what a person who's a dreamer and out of step with the real world might have lots of” *1

It is startling to hear Smith describe his work as spontaneous. This is a surprise because his formalist rigor evidences such control. Is he being ingenuous?

Ok. Why not? It is the performance of an expert and experienced talent doing what he does and doing it eloquently and efficiently, without waste. Equably. He does lots of walking around, looking and reacting, seeing, slipping into the environment, and then, as he indicates, taking a fraction of a second to snap the photo.

This process is not careless or carefree nor is the sensibility. Absurd, yes. Smith likes his protagonists “up a tree”. Or isolated or looking off into the infinite. Or with a hat over the face. Any good Freudian can identify and appreciate the artist’s doppelgänger in this work. Here he is lean and limber, bespoke with a magical hat, either a Magritte-style derby or classic fedora. Sometimes the antics on view conjure up Buster Keaton but without the porkpie hat. Smith’s stand-in feels closer to Jacque Tati’s M. Hulot than to any American film character.

The pictures with two protagonists go further to suggest a conflict between the artist’s conscious and unconscious selves, rational and irrational. There are the very odd twin “Men with Boxes on Head, Brunswick GA, 2001”, masked fellows sitting next to each other doing what exactly? Musing?

Look at the father and son types “Gary and Henry Chasing Butterfly, Beaufort, GA, 1996”. Is this a benign and delightful summer pastime or is it a glimpse of some divide between father and son — which Smith alludes to in his writing?

Smith deals with the landscape expertly. His hedges and walls of ivy are lushly textured; the blacks and whites lay out sharply. The shadows are deep and rich. These are whimsical photographs sited in meadows and forests with deep perspective, a mash up of his mentor, Ansel Adams, *2 and Cecil Beaton. Smith’s early experiments with developers, toners and papers to hone his craft gave him the freedom to gallivant around the woods with his merry band of elegant gypsies later on.

Smith’s sensibilities are quite French – evidenced by his affection for both elegant women and elegant landscapes. “France is a country that knows how to create and nurture women, and it knows how to shape its trees into a shrub. Nothing is too sacred. Top off a tree’s head, confine it to a small space, sheer it to within an inch of its life, and you have that wonderful French pollarded landscape.” *3

Does Smith’s insistence on order reveal a necessity for him to be vigilant, to keep his own unique counsel, to keep chaos at bay? The pictures are so very, very spot on and fun that it seems unkind to question and challenge the underbelly. Rather leave it at that. Recognize that we can’t know all. What fuels the artistry here — any pain or neurosis — brings the artist to a unique place. “I was an intense, anxiety-driven person, but the liability could be an asset: I could put my strong feelings to use, in a medium built on impulse and energy.” *4

When you simply look at the photographs, you are struck by the timelessness and the exactness, the certitude that everything in the frame is meant to be there. It is the highest praise to observe that these are straight pictures, made in camera with film and without any sort of mediation: no filters, no retouching, no post production whatsoever. He means it, and it’s all in there. Most often smack dab in the middle.

Smith frequented the MoMA and was counseled by the legendary curator, John Szarkowski. He knows and references his photo history — Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and especially Jacques-Henri Lartigue. *5

Lartigue and Smith shared a legacy of privilege; however, that was outweighed by their shared commitment to aesthetics. They were dandies, which Charles Baudelaire found to be a form of “Romanticism, coming close to spirituality and to stoicism. These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking … . One is reminded of a latent fire, whose existence is merely suspected, and which, if it wanted to, but it does not, could burst forth in all its brightness. All that is expressed to perfection in these illustrations.” *6

1 https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/whimsy

2. Smith studied and used Adams’ “Zone System”, an exacting technique for mastering exposure settings.

3. “How Green is My Valley”, from the artist’s blog, “The End”, 16 May 2011

4. pp.16-17, “Rodney Smith: Photographs”, Sterling Publishing Inc. Co. 2016

5. Look specifically at Kertesz (“The Dancing Faun, 1919”), and Cartier-Bresson (“Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932”) and especially Jacques-Henri Lartigue (“Zissou in his tire boat, Chateau du Rouzat , 1911”).

6. Excerpted from Charles Baudelaire “The Dandy” from “The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863. Translation by P.E. Charvet.