The Weather and a Place
to Live:
Photographs of the Suburban West
by Steven B. Smith
Winner
of the second biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman
First Book Prize
Robert
Pinsky, former Poet Laureate, cites The Weather and a Place
to Live and the animated television series South Park
as among the most notable cultural happenings of 2005
Ordering Information
Description
Photo Gallery
An Interview with
Steven B. Smith
Exhibition
Ordering Information
Published by Duke
University Press and CDS Books at the Center for Documentary
Studies
Available November 2005
128 pages, 10 x 9 inches
80 black-and-white photographs
Hardcover, ISBN 0-8223-3611-1
$39.95
The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban
West
is available from your local bookseller or by ordering directly
from Duke University
Press.
To order from Duke
University Press:
http://www.dukeupress.edu
1-888-651-0122 (phone)
1-888-651-0124 (fax)
Description
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize
in Photography presents the winning book in this important
series celebrating American photography
“Steven B. Smith won the prize for his intelligent choice
of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance.
His work is by turns humorous and piteous, elegiac and ironic, and
cumulatively very powerful 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.
Smith could have recorded a failure of the imagination or the ruin
of desert ecologies, but he was after something much more interesting
and amorphous—an intersection of human, climatic, and geographic
realms as yet without a name. Such an orderly, labor-intensive,
wide-ranging application of knowledge and engineering to the land
might be considered some novel and rampant form of garden
if houses and streets were not its principal rationale, but since
they are, this collocation is usually termed a suburb or a subdivision.
Surely these are inadequate terms for Smith’s subject, which,
in its totality, is a vision of the future of our planet, of the
time when man-made environments no longer just spread out in widening
circles around cities and encroach like weeds along the highways,
but hold sway everywhere, carpeting the land from valley to mountain
and from sea to sea.”
—Maria Morris Hambourg, Prize Judge
“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. The landscapes I saw were
scraped bare, resculpted, 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. In these areas water is
imported, tightly controlled, hoarded, and an element to barricade
against. I have focused on new construction sites to make a portrait
of the systems of control which prepare the land for habitation
and also guard them against nature.”
—Steven B. Smith
Steven B. Smith is a Professor of Photography at
the Rhode Island School of Design. He was born in American Fork,
Utah, and spent his early years in the small communities around
Salt Lake City. He has been awarded a Guggenheim and an Aaron Siskind
Fellowship for Photography.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Founding Curator of the
Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was
the prize’s judge. Her career began at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, where she worked closely with John Szarkowski in
the Department of Prints and Photographs. She has curated such exhibitions
as Thomas Struth, Avedon’s Portraits, Walker Evans,
and Carleton Watkins, the Art of Perception.
The Center for Documentary
Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
is open to American photographers who use their cameras for creative
exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of
the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it;
of objective or subjective realities.
See: Announcement
of the second biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman
First Book Prize in Photography Competition
Photo Gallery
Exhibition
Steven
Smith: Photographs of the Suburban West
Special Collections Gallery, Perkins Library, West Campus, Duke
University
November 7–December 14, 2005
Opening reception and presentation: November 10, 5–7 p.m.
Steven B. Smith will talk about his prize-winning photography and
sign books at the opening reception.
Audio/video
of Steven B. Smith talk in Perkins Library
banner image:
Photograph by Christopher Sims
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