Mickey Smith: Untitled No. 4 (Equivalents), 2011

“I remember the moment I first saw Alfred Stieglitz'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, and decimals I typically decipher.”—Mickey Smith

As a cultural archaeologist, Smith has focused her recent work on photographing bound periodicals, viewing them as fossil records of the twentieth 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.

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