Graham Smith (born 1947) is a photographer from
Middlesbrough, England, who was particularly active in photographing Middlesbrough and the north-east of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.
Life and work
Smith studied at the
Middlesbrough College of Art and later the
Royal College of Art (London).[1] In the 1970s he was among the photographers central to the
Side Gallery, and created a series of photographs that showed working-class people in the north of England that were in a documentary style but were in fact montages.[2] Work from the 1980s would show people within townscapes, and in the words of
David Alan Mellor, were "atmospheric, steeped in popular (and personal) memory — dark, romantic places with all the melancholy attributed to Eugène Atget's familiar locations".[2]: 110 Another Country, a joint exhibition with
Chris Killip held in London in 1985, was generally well reviewed but to some appeared passé in the light of the new "postmodern" work of
Martin Parr and others.[3]
Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker. His writing has appeared in Granta.
^Notice of Three from Britain exhibition, Artnet.com.
^
abMellor, David Alan. No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–87: From the British Council and the Arts Council Collections. London: Hayward Publishing, 2007.
ISBN978-1-85332-265-5.: 33
^Rose Gallery
press release for Three from Britain exhibition, Artnet.com. Accessed 11 April 2008.
References
Schad, Ed. "
A Look at Three from Britain". Artslant.com, 2008. Review of the exhibition. Accessed 11 April 2008.
"Three Photographers from Britain: Nothing but Class" at the
Wayback Machine (archived 3 June 2008). Photoinduced.com, 2008. As accessed by the Wayback Machine on 3 June 2008. A description of the exhibition Three Photographers from Britain; includes an article based on an interview with Smith.