The appreciation for Rodney Smith’s body of work has only increased with the passing years. At the time of his first book, In the Land of Light, published in 1983, Rodney was young and just out of Yale when he took off on a three-month journey around Israel, where he captured the faces of the country. The resulting volume is a timeless wonder. And if the photographs evoke Walker Evans’s Depression-era dust-bowl portraits, well, that may be because Evans had been his teacher at Yale.
These days Rodney’s work is revered as art, just as it had been revered as sublime illustration when much of it was originally published during the last golden age of magazines. There is something both ageless and completely modern in the crisp symmetry of his photographs. If I had to quantify the look, I might do it this way: Wes Anderson + René Magritte ÷ Federico Fellini - Irving Penn = Rodney Smith.
A Rodney Smith photograph can be whimsical but solemn, composed but candid, still but full of movement, mysterious but revealing, desperate but funny.
If I had to quantify the look, I might do it this way: Wes Anderson + René Magritte ÷ Federico Fellini – Irving Penn = Rodney Smith.
To artists, writers, and all other manner of creative people, these sorts of paradoxes have long been regarded as a tool rather than a bogeyman, a way of storing the hard-won harvests of history against the unforgiving winters of uncertainty, and a means of transforming the untouchable into something approaching the divine. To Rodney, paradox was not just a tool; it was the tool. As was his canon of recurring props: fedoras, bowlers, butterfly nets, umbrellas, cocktail dresses, privet hedges, topiary, bicycles, megaphones, golf clubs, and interesting staircases.
I came to know Rodney during my time as editor of Vanity Fair, on the commissioning end of things. I should mention that he was as beautifully assembled as one of his photographs: handsome, groomed, and dressed in timeless classics.
Like all great art, Rodney’s had a look that became singular over time, and you recognize it the moment you see it. And like so many great artists, he created his own world through it. His was as defined and as unique to him as Alfred Hitchcock’s, Ansel Adams’s, and Tim Burton’s are to them.
The pieces begin to fit together a bit more when you learn that Rodney studied theology at Yale before taking up a camera under Evans’s watchful eye. Like Evans, he set out with his Leica to capture images of workers, not only in Israel but in South America, Haiti, and Wales as well. And also like Evans, he later taught photography at Yale.
That battered Leica and, later, a Hasselblad seem like odd tools for a man who was also interested in things that cannot be represented visually but rather must be taken on faith. His photographs, and indeed his entire creative method, were the products of reconciliation. Only through such a process could a child of the higher realm of the fashion business, one who swore off his family’s firm, later capture some of the more striking fashion images of our time. And how else could a man who professed a degree of disdain for his own art form be so prolific over a 45-year career, not to mention profound?
A Rodney Smith photograph can be whimsical but solemn, composed but candid, still but full of movement, mysterious but revealing, desperate but funny.
Rodney’s images are at once timeless and startlingly fresh, as though he were not only trying to pay tribute to the pantheon of great artists but to ascend into it—Road with Trees, Burgundy, France (1985; plate 33) carries the weight of a Monet, and you would be excused for thinking Man Under Umbrella on Rooftop, New York, New York (1988; plate 34) was taken by Robert Doisneau. It’s relatively easy to list all the photographers (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Willy Ronis, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith) and the painters (from the Surrealists right on down to Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth) to whom Rodney owed a debt.
But to look at Rodney only as an accumulation of what he learned from others would be to diminish the hardest challenge for the artist: isolating himself. Formal academic training instilled in his work the almost classical feeling it’s now known for—in the firmament somewhere between the past and the present. It made him both consistent and unconventional at a time when many other photographers were experimenting while, simultaneously, trying to emulate those at the front of the pack.
Rodney’s way of applying order to his life involved clearing away all but the essentials. His pictures, despite having a surreal quality, are rather naturalistic, depending mostly on available light and unadulterated (if carefully manicured) landscapes. Later on, his move to color photography was a break from tradition but a concession to nature.
If you look at Rodney Smith’s photographs long enough, you begin to realize where his early theological training crept in. There is a sanctity and a grace in his pictures and also a faith that binds together all artists: that they know what they’re looking for, even if they haven’t seen it yet.
Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith will be available beginning May 16. On Sunday, May 21, the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, will host a conversation about the book followed by a signing; the event will take place at two P.M. and will also be available to stream remotely
Graydon Carter is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL
Nathan King is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL