Art
About everyday life in America's most frightening discomfort Zones ...

*Being well traveled    
should be markedly more valuable to a scholar than being well read.

About the Artist
 
While hitchhiking across the United States in 1978, Gary picked up a newspaper one morning at a truck stop and was inspired by an article he read promising cheaper international airfares under the new Airline Deregulation Act. That development, when blended with his inexplicable wanderlust, compelled him to decide right there and then to become a Global Street Photographer instead of the other less exciting things left available to him on his list of things he might become after getting badly mangled during a botched knee operation two years before.
                  In 1979 Gary established his studio in Lawrence, Kansas. After earning his undergraduate Photojournalism and News-editorial degree in 1984 from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, Smith met, dated, and married his lifetime travel companion Janet Cinelli. In between then and now, Smith has traveled to and practiced his street photography on location in more than 60 nations worldwide and in 1996 he earned a Master of Photographic Arts graduate degree after accepting and completing a teaching fellowship at Purdue University. In 1991 Smith was honored as one of the first winners of an international American Photo Magazine competition in recognition of earlier work made during the Cold War inspired conflicts on the streets of Central America. In 2000 he repeated as an American Photo international winner for his black and white study of the streets at the bottom of a volcanic eruption made in the Caribbean nation of Montserrat, and during that same year was cited by Black and White magazine when it named the Gary Mark Smith www.Streetphoto. com Art Site "One of the Top Ten Black and White Photography Web Sites on the Internet".
     In 1999 Gary released his first street photography journal (Molten Memoirs) about life at the bottom of the volcano, and in 2000 the Traver Foundation of Kansas released a portfolio collection (Searching For Washington Square) of 145 of the artist's early street photographs from around the world. In 2006 and 2007 he released editions of his third book, a street photography journal about the first year after the 9/11 attacks --- including essays, rumors, field notes and photographs from his excursions to a still-smoldering Ground Zero in New York and a still-exploding Tora Bora in Afghanistan. As his artist statement suggests, "Gary Mark Smith has (despite his reticence) become one of the most highly regarded and highly decorated global street photographers in history. His artworks are found worldwide and are sought by the finest museums and most astute private collectors.
        When he's not zipping off to God Knows Where in this world, Gary spends most of the rest of his time near his bungalow studio in Kansas and can most often be found there enjoying the company of his wife and friends; nursing his damaged leg; writing unusual books; Watching KU Jayhawk basketball; bird watching his way to and from his lakeside cabin south of town; tweaking his website; processing new streetphotos from his latest adventures; planning new adventures; issuing his online Streetphoto of the Week Exhibition; or playing with and pretending to loathe his lunatic cats.

 

*The artist in his camp outside a Red Cross storm shelter in Pearl River, Louisiana during the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina and the Flood of New Orleans.

September, 2005

* I’ve always thought that street photography should be a contact sport ---  

To Contact Gary Mark Smith

To email Gary, click the link below
gary@streetphoto.com

# 785/749-ARTS (2787)
1717 Illinois Street
Lawrence, KS  66044

* the Streetphoto of the Week archive