PHIL SMITH will lives in North Truro, Ma. and photographs his ‘hot spots’; places to which he has a personal relationship like Indiana (where he grew up), New York City (where he lived for many years), Florida, the American Southwest, and Cape Cod. Smith’s images are the results of a process that begins by exploring with the camera - looking at form, color, time and the story coming through the light seen through his lens. Once involved he focuses on the details as a way of getting the feeling of an abstract painting. His images can be read as paintings but excel as photographs.
Smith received his first serious camera in 1964, a Nikon F. In the early seventies he worked with Todd Walker, Jerry Uelsmann, and Doug Prince in the BFA program at the University of Florida. But his need to work with color moved him in the direction of painting and mixed media by the late seventies, for which he received an MFA from Hunter College in NYC. Still he was always seeing photographs as he walked the streets of NY and explored color photography using chemical methods. It was the introduction of digital cameras and archival inkjet printing in the nineties that brought Phil Smith back to photography. |
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