photographic work

In many years of reporting photography career, Smith hopes that his photos can play a role in life, and even directly intervene and struggle. Among them, Minamata was his most famous victory. It happened more than ten years after he left Spain. When his Japanese wife went to Japan for their honeymoon, he learned about the tragedy of a small fishing village called Minomata. The local villagers suffered from mercury poisoning due to factory wastewater, which led to lifelong paralysis and passed the disease on to the next generation. In order to shoot this special topic, he was almost killed by someone sent by the factory, but this did not shake his determination to make the truth of the incident public. In the whole shooting process, what he has to do is not only to record objective facts and evidence, but also to show people's courage and strength. This kind of courage and strength is the belief that supports his work and life, and it is also his most practical solidarity with the people he cares about. When Naoko's loving mother bathed her disabled daughter, her eyes were full of tears and she could hardly press the shutter.

Small still life in the main mirror

Of all the photographic subjects, still life is perhaps the most difficult to shoot well, but there are also many photographers who can interpret still life works to the extreme and find the core of life from still life. Especially, some photographers who are active in the fashion field have achieved a perfect grasp of still life photography, which is amazing.

Paul Outerbridge, Jr. (1896-1958), an American photographer, abstracted ordinary still lives in his early days. Later, he gradually grew into a fashion and advertising photographer, famous for making platinum photographic paper photos and being good at carbon bromide color photography. This photo "The Collar of Ide" (1922) is the first commercial advertisement accepted by Outerbridge. The photo shows a stiff collar with a curved shape, and the background is a strictly divided black and white chessboard, giving people an extremely accurate and indifferent visual experience. When Marshall Duchamp, a surrealist painter, first saw this advertisement in the June issue of Vanity Fair (1922), he called it "advanced" artwork, which had surreal meaning, and pasted the cut pages on the wall of his studio. Perhaps it is from this point that Duchamp saw that modern society is developing in a more and more accurate but less and less humane direction, making photos a prediction of the future society.

Outerbridge's most famous work is such a simple still life painting. However, it is such an image composed of humble gadgets that broke through the $200,000 mark of photography auction in the later auction market. It can be seen that we must never underestimate the charm of still life photography.