ALINE SMITHSON, take 2

I discovered Aline Smithson while at a Fourth of July party in my friend’s mother’s friend’s house. I was immediately drawn to a framed photograph on the hallway wall and, needless to say, learned it was the work of Aline Smithson. While I do not explicitly remember what the photograph was of (I think a boat in a lake…), I do remember being attracted to its strong use of light, composition and the sense of “purity” and simplicity it emitted. After divulging in more of her work, I was really impressed with her photographs and the approach she employs. I am particularly drawn to her ambition to explore everyday life with humor and integrity and capture the familiar, yet unexpected, through both black and white and color photography. She says, “The odd juxtapositions that we find in life are worth exploring, whether it is with humor, compassion, or by simply taking the time to see them” and I really admire this approach. Smithson wants herself and her viewer to “linger” within an image and is trying to evoke nostalgia and a “universal memory”. She successfully achieves this by purposively isolating her subjects in a certain manner (esp. in her children photographs) and limiting the amount of “action” within the frame. She often photographs a single person or a single object which, for me, forces me to ask more questions…why this one object? Why this one person? What’s the underlying significance of a half empty cereal bowl?


Her "Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother" series is relevant to the recent collaborative assignment in class and is thus worth mentioning. In this series (as well as Vintage Modern), Smithson is supplementing photography with hand oil painting in order to create color work. I personally find them very humorous and demonstrate her expansive creativity and artistic skills exceptionally well. Through her use of paint, she is able to individualize each photograph and make it evoke a distinct response. She is using a traditional painting off of which to base her work as well as traditional photographic techniques to create something very untraditional. I like it.