Rodney Smith: Photography Between Real and Surreal

The work of Rodney Smith (1947–2016) is above all an invitation to insinuate oneself into a world suspended between illusion and reality. Far from the modern conventions of documentary photography or realism, Smith has created a unique language on the boundary between these two worlds.

Each of his sublime, supreme images exerts a real fascination over the viewer, for they are the site of polarity and duality, of the utterance and its contradiction, of the place and its reverse.

Rodney Smith is not content merely to document the world; he transforms it and magnifies it, and only photography is capable of delivering, in a flash, his strange visions, his kind of visual impulses, as stunning and explosive as if they were about to break the sound barrier.

Text in English and Italian.