Shooting Stars: Joel Meyerowitz presents Jonathan Smith

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Jon follows in the tradition of the explorer-romantic, which embraces artists as diverse as Timothy O’Sullivan, Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, Frederick Sommer, Robert Adams and many others. Today, this tradition requires a poetic sensibility that can function in a reality overwhelmed by the failures of the postmodern industrial landscape. Jon’s work is an enterprise of consciousness and persistence, requiring long days out in the open along the edges of the continent, that wild place where the basic elements of earth and water are hard at it doing time’s eternal work of giving and taking away. The question we might ask of Jon is: Why this, why now? He has that youthful need to know just where he is at this time in his life, and one way of doing that is to seek out the far boundaries and see what is there and who you are in relation to it. -- Joel Meyerowitz

A two-volume retrospective book of Joel Meyerowitz’s work is due to be published in the fall. Jonathan Smith, 34, is based in New York City.