In addition to photographic objects, Smith made drawings and cartoons, watercolors, and silkscreen prints and matrices. 5) plays with the viewer’s understanding of the visual plane flat forms interact with light, almost shattering and emerging from the print’s two-dimensional format.Īcquired directly from Smith in 1979, the Henry Holmes Smith Archive at the Eskenazi Museum of Art is home to the largest public collection of Smith’s works, as well as the largest holding of works by an individual artist in the museum’s collection. 4), two spectral figures materialize side-by-side, both enigmatically composed of and enveloped by delicate liquid striations. The refraction prints are also some of Smith’s earliest photographic investigations of archetypal imagery, which masterfully straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. These refraction-or “Liquid-and-Light”-prints echo the early principles of photographic experimentation and even reference the medium’s Latin etymology: photo- + -graphy, or light drawing. After pouring the viscous mixture onto the support, Smith beamed a theatrical spotlight through the “lens,” generating an exposure on light-sensitive paper. Smith’s investigation of materials reached an apex when he began experimenting with Karo corn syrup, water, and glass or Plexi sheets. It would be decades before the use of color gained wider acceptance in fine art photography. 4 At this time, color photography was ascribed to the world of commercial advertising Smith’s retreat from the clean lines of black-and-white photographs was in direct opposition with many of the medium’s earliest champions: Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. As early as 1936, Smith added vibrant, colorful hues through dye-transfer, a photographic process used to prepare color prints by operating three matrices with separate cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes. 3 In parallel to Moholy’s work, Smith began projecting light through materials like glass, mirrors, prisms, and mesh screens, as exemplified in his Light Studies (figs. He set his camera aside and focused on alternative materials and processes, including photomontage, photograms, solarization, and multiple exposure prints. Smith believed in photography’s capacity to provoke emotional and psychological responses through variations in light and color. 2 These experiences provided him with a consistent platform to test his theories on photography and pedagogy, with the goal of increasing the medium’s humanist potential. Smith’s work in this field resulted in countless published articles, two noteworthy academic workshops, and the establishment of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE). He sought to shift the focus of photographic education from scientific and indexical to aesthetic and transcendental. Smith managed the photo lab and taught a course on light modulation, launching his career in photography education, thirty years of which were spent as a professor at IU.Īs an educator, Smith imparted the idea that one should read a photograph as one reads a text. Sensing their kinship, Moholy asked Smith to join the faculty at the New Bauhaus, a design school founded that year to continue the work of its German antecedent. The two photographers’ worlds merged in 1937 when Smith moved to Chicago and invited Moholy to visit the color photo lab he managed at Marshall Field's department store. Smith had already departed from the leading documentary style of the interwar period, instead pursuing the use of color plates, abstract forms, and light modulations (fig. The New Vision articulated many of Smith’s own concerns about the conventions of subject matter in particular, the notion that photographs should function solely as emblems of truth or as vehicles of reportage.
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