Stanley Smith

Biography

I live in Ashland Oregon, where I co-own a business called Art Authority, which provides fine art reproductions to museums all over the world. I have been photographing most of my life, despite being dismissed as president of the Photography Club at my high school for printing an unseemly picture in the school darkroom. I have exhibited my work widely in galleries and museums in the US.

Artist Statement

I am a collector. I tend to document places and events over time, and seek to represent them by collecting various images for later digital reconstruction. In spite of making thousands of photographs, my pictures don’t have much to do with traditional photography. I enjoy thinking about sequential events that normally may elude a photographer who roams the landscape looking for a “decisive moment”. More often than not I visualize an idea, then seek images to flesh out my notion. While I resist the fact that a photograph only records a brief moment in time, I am not ready to give up the lovely static nature of a photographic print; so I fold a timeline into my pictures, hoping to reveal more than would normally be available with a single brief glance of the camera. Digital tools are particularly suited to my approach. While my past work has been somewhat similar in concept—I assembled disparate objects in the studio to create assemblages that made formal, but not necessarily metaphoric sense. These set-ups resulted in a single exposure, and I was limited by what I could do in front of the lens. Now my pictures are built behind the scenes with the computer, combining many elements in a virtual world with few technical limitations.