May 2023
Matthew Smith
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
“Good works of art should be about everything—a microcosm of the world.”
—Matthew Smith
Editor-In-Chief Amanda Quinn Olivar speaks with photographer Matthew Smith about Ascension, his new exhibition at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi in Rome.
The images of Ascension are a surprising constellation of life that merges with the personal and the collective and unites the transcendent with the discovery of an aesthetic landscape. The emotional intensity dialogues with a profound spirituality. In this state, the sublime spreads in the details, in the discovery of light, the progress of the shadows, and the in the moon’s appearance in the water. An impulse that gives us the perception of life composed of a poetic visual vocabulary. Life again and again, which is revealed in the details, gives complex and intercalated visual states whose unexpected twists open up unexplored worlds.
This landscape becomes a hybrid archipelago composed of different cities: Venezia, Venice Beach, London, and Tokyo. Picking up Édouard Glissant’s foresight that “the entire world is becoming an archipelago,” the dissolution of memory began a fluid territory in which to project a new existential paradigm.
- Camilla Boemio, Ascension exhibition curator
Amanda Quinn Olivar: Hi, Matthew. Thank you for taking the time. Please tell our readers a bit about yourself and when your early experience with photography and writing.
Matthew Smith: Hi Amanda, it’s lovely to meet you. I was born in East London, near the Roman Road, in Bow. I have fond memories of it and of returning to visit after we moved to the countryside when I was five. My childhood has both sides of the English experience, a very multicultural London side, and an idyllic rural side. I grew up surrounded by nature, hills, and woodland. Both play essential parts in my memory and my creative imagination now.
I was always torn between art school and reading English Literature at degree-level. I wanted to be a writer as well as a visual artist. I experimented with photography at high school, where we were lucky to have a dark room. Also, my dad is a fine artist, and at the time, he was an art lecturer, so he would take film rolls into his college to develop them for me. Eventually, I went to Oxford to read English, and the photography went away for a while. I rediscovered it around ten years later, and soon I was making pictures again and writing as in my teenage days.
I first picked up a camera while making pinhole photography images during a summer course. It’s a great way to experience the magic of setting up the image and the patience to wait to see the result when using film. I took my dad’s Olympus OM1 to Venice in my early teens and shot some black-and-white rolls there. It was the first time I tried to take some images that felt like ‘my’ images. I remember seeing a woman running across San Marco Piazza in the rain in her wedding dress and feeling that I had been gifted a picture.
I’ve been writing stories and poems for as long as I can remember. It used to be a much more challenging process but now feels joyful, as with taking photographs.
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
AQO: What was the turning point that led you to pursue art as a career? Did you ever have second thoughts?
MS: From when I was a child, I knew I had to focus on my creative work. Dedicating large amounts of time to making art is not always straightforward on a practical level, but there was never any doubt that that was my challenge in life.
AQO: How did your upbringing influence your art-making? What informs it today?
MS: My dad was and still is an artist, so the idea of having exhibitions and so on was normal. There were many literary and visual arts books in the house, and I was always taken to galleries. We had access to many art-house films through my dad’s college library, which greatly formed my visual imagination. My dad lived in Paris for a few years. I wouldn’t say I had an ‘international’ upbringing, but I knew my work would see me traveling, and there is always a desire to find new ideas by going to other countries and cultures. Growing up in the countryside helped me focus on my imaginative world; there were fewer distractions there. I live in London now and wonder how my daughters will grow up differently here.
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
AQO: I'm excited to learn of your exhibition at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi in Rome. Please tell us about it and the title Ascension.
MS: My first wife was diagnosed with incurable cancer a few months before the start of lockdown. The series I had been working on up to that point became a way to deal with the situation. And after she passed away nine months later, the series developed further. Walking through the empty city with my camera, gradually watching it come back to life, felt like exploring my inner world. Previous images taken in Venice, California, and Venice, Italy, and Tokyo suggested themselves for inclusion. An invisible city formed, representing a city of the soul. As you go through the exhibition and the photo book, you are exploring this place that seems to change in front of you. The title Ascension references the way we seem to explore certain experiences in life again and again until we transcend them.
AQO: Choose a piece in your show and tell us its story: what was on your mind when you started it and your process from conception to end…
MS: The lead image for me personally is this picture of a tree lit up in shadow. I was experimenting with using a tripod more, so I carried my Hasselblad and tripod on a family walk in a park in North London. I could see some light flashing in the tree line off to one side, it was an evening during the lockdown, and I rushed into the trees to see what effect the light would be making. I saw this image in front of me, but I didn’t want to unfold the tripod, so I leaned on the closed legs like a pole instead. Tripods don’t work for me in most cases; they’re only for studio work now. The tree seemed to be bursting into flames after exposure to film, which, in the context of the series, fits with the idea that the viewer is in a world where personal revelations are possible.
Ascension by Matthew Smith, 2023
AQO: What is important to you about the visual experiences you create?
MS: I want to take the viewer on a journey of self-discovery. I’ve always been drawn to the quest myth, so for me, every photo series starts to take on the form of a journey within.
Good works of art should be about everything—a microcosm of the world. I try to ensure I’ve touched on as wide a variety of things as possible in my photo series, novels, and poems: a cigarette packet, birds, motherhood, death, birth, flowers, and reflections. Powerful themes and feelings emerge to connect them all.
AQO: What artists or movements have influenced you?
MS: Robert Frost, Nabokov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Masao Yamamoto, Paolo Roversi, and many other writers and photographers. The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Nas. I listen to music more than I engage with any other art form.
AQO: What is your favorite art accident?
MS: Any time you are surprised as a photographer by what emerges in the lab. You can see how setting up the proper creative process can lead to occasional accidents that seem intentional and often develop the work.
Matthew Smith is a photographer and a writer based in North London, UK. His photo series Ascension won honorable mentions at the Lucie International Photo Awards 2020, the Moscow International Foto Awards in 2020 and 2021, and the Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022. His first photo series Chora was exhibited at Hagi Art, Tokyo, in 2020, and Landabout Tokyo, and Arte Spazio Tempo, in Venice, in 2021. His photography has been featured in group shows in the US, UK, and Italy group shows
Red Turtle Photobook has just published a book of Matthew Smith’s Ascension photographs and is available to order here.
Matthew Smith
Ascension
AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome
Supported by Arts Council England
April 13 — May 5, 2023