2004 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner
Stephen B. Smith
The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West
Steven B. Smith received his BFA from Utah State University and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He has taught photography at Yale University and at Brown University. He currently lives in Barrington, Rhode Island, where he is now head of the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Smith was selected for his series of black and white photographs of new construction sites in California, Utah, Nevada and Colorado.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and judge for the 2004 competition, said she chose Smith for the prize, "because of his intelligent choice of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance. The mindless subjugation of the land to lockstep suburbia is wretched even when carried out in more forgiving terrain, but in an ecosystem as fragile as the desert, this misuse will be fatal unless it is shown and stopped....
Smith's book about this short-sighted undertaking will be by turns humorous and piteous, elegaic and ironic, and cumulatively very powerful..."
Stephen Smith has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship for Photography, and Harvard University's John Anson Kitteridge Fellowship, and received an Eisenstadt Award for photographs published in DoubleTake magazine.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Yale Art Gallery, among others.
Smith's photographs have been exhibited most at the Museum of Modern Art; Foley Gallery, New York; Kris Graves Projects, Brooklyn; Salt Lake Art Center; University of Maine Museum of Art; and Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York. He is represented by Sasha Wolf Gallery.