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Steven B. Smith, a photography professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, has been selected to receive the second Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for his black-and-white photographs of new construction sites in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado.
Maria Morris Hambourg, curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Photographs, was the prize's judge. She chose Smith for the prize "because of his intelligent choice of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance. The mindless subjugation of the land to lockstep suburbia is wretched even when carried out in more forgiving terrain, but in an ecosystem as fragile as the desert, this misuse will be fatal unless it is shown and stopped."
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"Smith's book about this short-sighted undertaking will be by turns humorous and piteous, elegaic and ironic, and cumulatively very powerful," Hambourg continued, "for he has shaped an essay from aesthetically elegant, delicately nuanced pictures that are pitch perfect, in the spirit of the American West and in keeping with its long history of fine photographs."
Hambourg will write the introduction for the book, which will be published in fall 2005 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.
Smith, who has a master's degree from the Yale School of Art, has been awarded a Guggenheim and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship for Photography and has received an Eisenstadt award from Life magazine for work (from this project) that appeared in DoubleTake magazine. This collection of photographs of the manmade Western landscape will be his first book.
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"In 1991 I moved to Los Angeles and was so astounded by what I saw happening to the landscape as it was being developed that I started photographing it immediately," said Smith. "The landscapes I saw were scraped bare, re-sculpted, sealed, and then covered so as not to erode away before the building process could be completed. These places were areas of change and transition revealing what the land had recently been and its future course. Water use in these landscapes is a central component of this project . . . water is imported, tightly controlled, hoarded, and an element to barricade against."
These images create, in Smith's words, "a portrait of the systems of control which prepare the land for habitation and also guard them against nature. In making these photographs I wanted the manmade and natural elements of the landscape within each picture to communicate in a more extended and elaborate dialogue."