The way Tim Smyth consistently returns to the same concept, even when the subject matter is entirely different, has an almost stubborn quality. One year, a sack of rejected carrots from a farm in North Yorkshire was photographed for ten hours straight in a studio. The following year, it depicts a serene portrait of a young Nigerian man sitting on a kitchen chair in the Spoleto suburbs of Italy, with the kind of calm that only comes after a long journey. The work has a different appearance. It turns out that the question beneath doesn’t.
Who gets to be examined is essentially the question. Before anyone has a chance to look, who gets sorted out? In interviews, Smyth doesn’t actually say this. It doesn’t seem necessary for him to. Almost without permission, the images themselves keep coming back to it.
It is difficult to ignore how frequently his subjects are objects or individuals that have been set aside. Supermarket shoppers reject vegetables that are misshapen. Late at night, food scraps were taken from restaurant trash cans and placed under sodium lamps on London pavements. West African immigrants who came to Italy were assimilated into a kind of social periphery. The person you arrived with left the hotel room. The vocabulary shifts. The grammar doesn’t.
In his Spoleto refugee series, there is a minor detail that has stuck with me. There is silence in the portraits. Nearly domestic. The images he takes of men who have traveled across seas and deserts appear to have been taken on a Sunday afternoon. In a media culture that rewards visual shock, that decision seems like a kind of rejection. He most likely loses reach as a result. It also seems intentional.
The release of his Defective Carrots coincided with Instagram’s teachings on how to make life appear easier. Every plate of food was becoming a tiny advertisement for the filters. In light of this, taking pictures of knobbly, split, twisted carrots with the attention to detail typically used for portraits began to feel more like a dispute than a still life. The joke took a serious turn when Martin Parr named it one of the year’s best books. Yale and MoMA began gathering it. The carrots were now proof.
When you look at the question instead of the subjects, it’s odd how neatly the carrots and the refugee series fit together. In separate rooms, they both ask the same question. Who determines what is important? Who determines what should be on display? He doesn’t emphasize its subtle political undertones.
Since then, he has worked on other projects. Built from emails his partner sent from London while he was working in Italy, In Your Absence is primarily about distance rather than food. In the greater context of that conflict, the al-Assad Campaign’s small gesture of sending print sales to Syria Relief speaks volumes about how he views his own position.
As it develops, it seems as though Smyth is merely circling one topic rather than actually switching between them. The question will almost certainly accompany him, regardless of what he decides to photograph next.
