Graham smith photographer biography books
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Where Killip’s brilliant images (which will be examined more closely in an upcoming review of his Photographer’s Gallery show) cut across the major strands of his work and show the deindustrialization of England, the marginal economies of the Seacoal community, and life in the fishing village of Skinningrove, Smith’s gives us a more intimate view of working-class life in Middlesbrough.
A powerful portrait of British society
A key opening image is of that of the Commercial Pub.
It’s a multi-layered image where Smith introduces a cast of community characters: the stern, suited man, the woman with her handbag, the child with a pram, and the three people standing outside the pub.
It’s an image anchored in its time: the cars, the McEwans and Whitworth brewery signs, the advertising, and even the grim-up-north layer of mist add to the picture.
The print itself, printed on a very warm paper, adds another layer of detail.
Look closely at the three people by the pub and you can see one laughing, his mouth caught as he mouths a word that might begin with ‘f.’
The images from inside the pubs are filled with affection and life, merging people and place, showing a world in which Smith and his large-format camera most definitely belonged. It’s the same judgment that saw Richard Billingham’s mother labeled as unfit for purpose and pushed Jo Spence into the photographic wilderness for being of the wrong class, gender, and appearance.
People’s stories
There are more affectionate pictures, like the man in the Zetland Bar smiling shyly as he has his hair caressed and braided by two women in fur coats, but there is also sadness and struggle in the exhibition—signs that life is hard, that money is tight, that people worry about where the next pay envelope will come from, how the next gas bill will be paid, what the kids will have for dinner.
It is work with soul and understanding, both of the places and the people that he photographed, and the ways in which people and place coexist.
My father, mother, stepfather, and their friends are all good drinkers and they have used, and they have always used the same few pubs, which we consider to be the best in Middlesbrough. Maybe it’s been a bit cathartic for him. It adds another element to the work. These were not intended for public reading.
It is also part of what many hope will be a rebirth of Graham Smith’s photography career, with the hope that more exhibitions and books will come.
20/20: Chris Killip/Graham Smith / Augusta Edwards Fine Art, Gallery 8, Cromwell Place, Londres
Photography and Travel
Photography and travel go hand in hand—landmarks and scenic vistas everywhere are thronged by tourists with their eye to the view finder, trying to capture their memories on film or in megapixel.
On the backs of the prints he has stories of people in the photographs. When the pioneers of photography, Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, made their inventions public in 1839, advocates for the new technology immediately recognized photography's capability to vividly present the spectacles of the world and make famous sights accessible to those who were not able to experience them in person.
Smith’s work is shown alongside photographs by his close friend Chris Killip, as a homage to an earlier 1985 exhibition called Another Country.
“The original Another Country had 140 pictures, this has 20 by each photographer, with no accreditation of who took which picture.
He’s printed again for this show and he wrote for the catalog.”
The exhibition is part of a reinforcement of Killip’s status as one of the greats of British documentary photography. Smith also examines how photographers often go to great lengths and face considerable danger to record exotic destinations, from the ice caves of the Mer de Glace to the maw of Vesuvius, the summit of Mount Everest, and even the pockmarked surface of the moon.
It showed the lives of his friends, neighbors, and fellow drinkers in Middlesbrough, a town in northeast England that had once been at the forefront of industrialization and now, after the enforced decline of the Thatcher years, was depressed in terms of economy, infrastructure, and hope for the future.
“For the last ten years I have photographed in Middlesbrough, nowhere else,”wrote Smith in his MoMA bio.“Like my parents I was born and brought up in the town.
It might be that I’m using the camera as a way of looking at friends, family, people from their past and, in turn, my background. The truth might be that the camera is just an extension of my drinking arm.”
Rediscovery of a work
MoMA’s 1991 exhibition (which also featured work by Chris Killip, Martin Parr, Paul Graham, and John Davies — see the catalog here) was seized upon by the News of the World newspaper.
In this lively account of the partnership between photography and travel, Graham Smith explores the diverse ways pictures and travel have been partnered from the nineteenth century to today.
Taking us from France and Italy to Egypt, Japan, and North America, Smith illustrates how photography was influenced by new forms of transcontinental travel, including railroads, cars, and planes.
Sandy and his Aunty Elsie, Early Doors in the Commercial, shows a man and a woman having a drink, his face close to hers in hazy affection. Smith was blamed for the words of sensationalist journalists and threatened with violence.
“Because of that he stopped taking pictures, he stopped photography,” says gallerist Augusta Edwards.
I asked Chris if he could persuade Graham to exhibit. They are used by those who live on the edge, whose future is the next good time, the next good drink.