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*About the
Artist
Driven
from his hiding place in Kansas by a puzzling wanderlust, Gary Mark Smith has
(despite his reticence) become one of the most highly regarded and highly decorated
global street photographers in history {Snapshot
Resume}. Since 1982 he has faithfully lived up to his global
billing
by executing several extensive street photography field expeditions per year
(every year) out on the streets of more than 60 countries on six
continents. Although most of these journeys focus on hunting down and capturing visually bold and
intellectually stimulating candid moments at public gathering places (a
people-watching bystander stalking the poetry of everyday life out on the
streets) --- Gary may best
be known for photographing extraordinary and sometimes violent historical streets in their
times.
Occasionally it's during
breakouts of war and peace, or breakouts of fierce natural calamity -- or
streets in times of revolutionary transition and disarray. But
typically, when there is no history drawing him to its streets in it's
time, Gary wanders aimlessly around the globe in his own time. Hanging
around at outdoor cafes or on streaming street corners or on park benches --- willfully scouting for and
anticipating moments of fleeting street art.
Typically camping out in his tent on location at city campgrounds to save
money, thereby availing himself the lengths of time required abroad to
accomplish his dedicated task: To
create a compelling global street photography portfolio during one artist's
lifetime revealing both the variety of culture and the similarity of spirit
and infrastructure one finds out on the streets of a single planet during one generation where predominantly urban
people can be studied and photographed going about the task of
living out the leisure and bustle and sometimes grind of their everyday
public lives.
Artist
Biography
Contact
Resume
Media
Profile
References
Links
Streetphoto
Rave
Following
is the forward essay by
James R. Hugunin to G. Mark Smith's street photography journal Searching For Washington Square,
about
Smith’s global street photography method. Hugunin teaches photo
history and contemporary theory at The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and is Managing Editor of U-Turn E-zine {www.uturn.org}
*Global
Wandering
As
Method
His interest
(Constantin Guys) is the whole world; he wants to know, understand
and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe . . . The
crowd is his element . . . For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate
spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude,
amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite
...
—
"The Painter of Modern Life," Charles Baudelaire
In his
autobiographical photo-travelogue, Molten Memoirs (1999), Gary Mark Smith
confesses that thirty years ago he had "dreams about becoming an artist (it
was a contrary world I saw myself heading into) and traveling the world. Or
maybe even becoming an artist known for including his wanderlust as a principal
notion in his methodology." Such a method is a time-honored one. In Eastern
literature we have the wandering Japanese poet Basho (1644-1694) who, in his
Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, wrote: "From this day forth I shall be
called a wanderer . . ." Basho's haiku has the vivid immediacy of a street
photographer's grabshot:
Time
and time again, nipped by a sickle, with a click — beautiful, beautiful
cherry.
Smith might rewrite this stanza
as:
Time and time again, loading my camera, with a click — beautiful, beautiful
street.
And
there was that literary gadabout Henry Miller, who in his preface to his
bittersweet "travelogue" across America, The Air Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), said of the typical American home: "It was home, with all the ugly,
evil, sinister connotations which the word contains for a restless soul."
Further in that book, Miller could be describing the street photographers' raw
material: "Events transpire in all declensions at once; they are never
conjugated." Never conjugated, that is, until the camera's click
paradoxically suture's together (as Roland Barthes has noted) "That has
been" with "There it is." Closer to Smith's time and his
Lawrence, Kansas home we find singer Hank Williams (1923-1953), who recorded his
atypical music under the alias Luke the Drifter. One of those songs, Pictures
From Life's Other Side (1951), recalls the range of Smith's bittersweet
observations while roving that theater, The Street:
There's
pictures of love and passion, and there's pictures of peace and strife.
There
hang pictures of youth and of beauty, of old age and the blushing young bride.
They all hang on the wall, but the saddest of all, are the pictures of life's
other side.
Just a
picture from life's other side, someone that fell by the way.
A life
that's gone out with the tide...
The
idea that the world is a stage (Theatrum mundi) has a long tradition. In 1858 a
journalist, Victor Fournel, wrote a book titled Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de
Paris (What one sees on the streets of Paris); employing the metaphor of the
street-as-theater, Fournel declaimed: to stroll the sidewalks was to "take
my seat in the pit of this improvised theater." Gary Mark Smith has taken
his place before the global stage of street life; with his camera in hand, he's
become an active bystander of the sorts originally played by the chorus in Greek
drama. Smith speaks passionately about his fascination with street life,
recalling poet Czeslaw Milosz's comments after arriving in Paris after World War
II: he spoke of his "joyous immersion in the reservoir of universal life .
. . a swimmer who trusts himself to the wave, and senses the immensity of the
element that surrounds him." It is this oceanic feeling that Baudelaire
attributes to the artist Constantin Guys in The Painter of Modern Life.
*"Gary Mark Smith has taken
his place before the global stage
of street life; with his camera in hand, he's
become an active bystander
of the sorts originally played by the chorus in Greek drama."
German
critic Walter Benjamin, in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), extrapolates
from Baudelaire's insights on the observer of the amorphous crowd to photography
and the modern scene: One abrupt movement of the hand [like lighting a match]
triggers a process of many steps. . . . Of the countless movements of switching,
inserting, pressing, and the like, the "snapping" of the photographer
has had the greatest consequences. . . The camera gave the moment a posthumous
shock, as it were. . . Moving through this [city] traffic involves the
individual in a series of shocks and collisions. . . Baudelaire speaks of the
man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy.
Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man "a
kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness."
*"Nearly all these images are
sympathetic toward their subjects,
foregoing the aggressiveness and social
satire of street photographer
Garry Winogrand's oeuvre. Whereas Winogrand
remained an outsider
on the street, Smith seems to resonate with the energy of
the crowd,
empathize with his subjects."
Indeed,
Smith's vision of the global street scene is kaleidoscopic. His book tracing his
many journeys is divided into blending sections; the opening segment includes
slices of unpopulated streets, formal compositions that startle by the power and
oddness of their found juxtapositions as in Eat At Ed's/Chicago, Illinois which
makes a typical Tod Papageorge photograph appear modest by comparison.
Then the
complexity of diverse street elements are added, as found in American Skate-Scape/West
Lafayette, Indiana ...
... or humorous roadside attractions make their debut like we
see in BeerBottle BigScape/ Washington, Pennsylvania.
This section is also
devoted to street people the world over, as in the very funny image of an sedate
old man flanked by outrageously garbed transvestites in Odd Man Out/Toronto,
Canada.
But not all these street folks stand out due to their oddness; many are
ordinary folk playing a musical instrument ...
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... catching the sun ...
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... reading a
newspaper ...
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... curiously peering out
windows ...
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... or just dozing.
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Nearly all these images are
sympathetic toward their subjects, foregoing the aggressiveness and social
satire of street photographer Garry Winogrand's oeuvre. Whereas Winogrand
remained an outsider on the street, Smith seems to resonate with the energy of
the crowd, empathize with his subjects.
Next
follows a brief glimpse at the "bawdy street," where one figure sports
pants emblazoned all over with "fuck fuck fuck fuck" (Picton, New
Zealand) {Bawdy} and an umbrella's violent end as a heap of junk is shown to
fortuitously formally mimic the wall graffiti behind it (Amsterdam Impressions
Red Light District/ Amsterdam, Netherlands).
*"...
formal compositions that startle by the power and
oddness
of their found juxtapositions ... which
makes a typical Tod Papageorge
photograph appear modest by comparison."
In the
final section, Streets in Time, Smith brings together images from various
international "pain capitals," often risking his own neck in the
process: El Salvador; Belfast, Northern Ireland; Moscow, Russia; Havana, Cuba;
and lastly, Montserrat where Smith was present during several horrifying
pyroclastic events near the active volcano there (see Smith's Molten Memoirs for
additional images and text). Here instead of the good ‘n plenty of the streets
seen in the scores of images up to this point, we now see a theater of
disasters: similar streets but now devoid of people, streets smothered in
volcanic ash, or whole areas blown to smithereens as in Plymouth, Montserrat.
Smith here also includes gentle portraits of the native inhabitants who,
stoically resisting leaving their homeland despite the dangers, seem to say:
"These are our streets! And we'll be damned if we're going to be driven
out."
Driven
on, Smith leaves Montserrat for the States. The book ends on a quirky note
concerning consumerism and spectacle that would've warmed the heart of Walter
Benjamin: a young child imagines playing basketball before a huge upended brand
name athletic shoe
— a Brobdingnangian replacement for all the shoes Smith has
worn out on his global jaunts—its massive rubber sole holding up the basket.
— — — James R. Hugunin,
Chicago, Illinois
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#785.749.ARTS (2787)
1717 Illinois Street
Lawrence, KS 66044
USA
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