Look at This

Look at This: Larry Smith in Black & White, 1967–2025, the inaugural title from Rational Beauty Press by award-winning designer Jeanette Abbink, captures the life’s work of American photographer Larry Smith. The book includes an essay by Patrick Kelly, Executive Director & Curator at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas, and a conversation with Valentin Diaconov, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Whitworth, University of Manchester.

Thanks to Eastman Kodak and its introduction of the Brownie camera in 1900, the means to create a photograph expanded to the masses. Almost everyone became a "photographer," yet viewing the captured image involved a lengthy analog process. The digital age also allows everyone to be a "photographer" and everything a subject to be photographed, yet most of these digitally stored images rarely make it to print. A photograph that endures must demand our attention, affect us emotionally or intellectually, and hold our interest. This requires skill, talent, and quite often, sheer luck.

Since his early teens, photographer Larry Smith has honed his technical skills, making them second nature, which has allowed him instead to focus on thoughtful observation and intuition. In doing so, he seizes on compositional opportunities many others dismiss or are oblivious to. Nothing is overtly spectacular about Smith’s chosen subjects. In fact, they are scenes, scenarios, people, and places we likely encounter every day. What is remarkable is his ability to glean from the ordinary an image worthy of consideration.

Smith’s knack for being in the right place at the right time coupled with his ability to recognize, compose, and capture an image in a fraction of a second is a combination that takes decades to perfect. His black and white photographs record what it is to be human—documenting the simple pleasure of family and friends, isolation in a world filled with others, moments of melancholy, and the monotony that fills the gaps.