Untitled No 4 (Equivalents), Courtesy the artist
“I remember the moment I first saw Alfred Steiglitz’s Equivalents series. I was a sophomore in college. I had just left my art history class and I was sitting outside the science hall skipping ahead to look through the small photography section in the back of the Jansen. I loved the image and was stunned to learn that such a simple concept was revolutionary for photography at that time. When I came upon this stack of periodicals at The New School in New York twenty years later, it was a reprieve for me from the city and the dizzying words, letters, numbers, decimals I typically decipher.”
—Mickey Smith
Aperture is excited to offer this limited-edition print by Mickey Smith created especially for our collecting audience. As a cultural archaeologist, Smith has focused her recent work on photographing bound periodicals, viewing them as fossil records of the 20th century unknowingly left behind. She is fascinated by the idea that while the library was once the source of culture, it is now a cemetery for the written word. This body of work explores themes of association and disassociation, as each set of periodicals represented a tangible common culture, unifying communities of readers with shared interests and identities. Now 21st century viewers are more likely to see their own inherited history within the periodicals, rather than the written content.
Mickey Smith (b. 1972 Duluth, MN USA) received a BA in Photography from Minnesota State University, Moorhead in 1994. Smith has received the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art Affairs, CEC ArtsLink and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has exhibited in New York, China and Russia. In 2010, her work was selected as one of the 40 best permanent public art works in the United States by the Americans for the Arts. Smith is represented by Invisible-Exports in New York.
Click here to purchase the limited edition photograph by Mickey Smith.
