MIKE SMITH
Color Photographs of East Tennessee

October 11–December 14
Public Reception: October 23, 6–8 p.m., Artist's Talk: 7 p.m.

Mike Smith’s landscape photographs explore remote parts of rural Appalachia, depicting the isolation and interactions of the mountain landscape and the people who make their lives there. Eschewing "housing developments and their accompanying supercenters," which look like "any other place in America," Smith finds strength in the individuals who, in his eyes, resist homogenization of their lives and communities. "The lack of change in spite of so many influences is to me evidence of an unspoken, collective will. That’s what I try to photograph."

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1951 to a military family, Smith grew up in and around Boston. He enlisted in the Army during the Vietnam War, and began to photograph his surroundings, including his friends and the land and people of Vietnam. In 1981, after completing a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art, Smith moved to Johnson City, Tennessee, where he found an Appalachian community that complicated his understanding of Southern culture. "My preconceptions were entirely wrong," says Smith. "The mountain culture is distinct from the Deep South, with a different set of endeavors. There’s nothing large, no agribusiness. It’s family farming, small crops. The mountains have always been a haven for people who wanted to get away. They have an independence in their thinking. They understand the solitary nature of life."

Smith’s landscapes are fundamentally bound to the individuals whose lives have left their mark within the frame of the image. "There’s not a pure landscape among them," says Smith. "Each one reflects something about the people who own that land."
North Carolina writer Lee Smith (no relation to the photographer) writes in an essay about the photographs: "Smith specializes in ghost landscapes. Always, we find traces of people. He loves weeds, brush, and junk of all kinds in various stages of decay. These structures don’t mar the landscape—they are the landscape." Commenting on his insider/outsider status in the community, Lee Smith writes, "Being ‘not from around here’ himself, Mike Smith can still see his beloved east Tennessee landscape with the eye of a respectful stranger, yet his twenty-year residency affords him a kind of privileged double vision. If he is not from this land, he is certainly of it."

Exploring the region near his home on his motorcycle, Smith loses himself in a landscape that has held his attention for more than two decades. His commitment to his work is centered in "a desire to know the place. Most of these pictures were taken ten miles from my house, the results of many visits to the same places—twenty years of traveling the same roads in many seasons. … I go all over the place because I love getting lost. I just want to know how to get home at the end of the day. I don’t want to know anything else."
"You have to go pretty far up into the hills to find what I’m looking for, places with wonderful names like Lick Skillet and Troublesome Hollow Road," says Smith. "It’s a purely personal response that encompasses a range of emotions, including humor and mystery. I’m trying to describe—artistically, visually—what it’s like to live in southern Appalachia today."

Mike Smith: Color Photographs of East Tennessee is composed of thirty-three 30x40 and 20x24 color prints. Smith has shown his work in numerous galleries and museums, with solo shows at galleries in New York and Chicago and group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith’s photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Library of Congress, among other places. He directs the photography program at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, where he has taught since 1981.

Clockwise from top left:
Bristol, VA 1996
Fox Hollow, TN 1996
Unicoi County, TN 1998
Blountville, TN 2000
Carter County, TN 1996
Gray, TN 1996