When you read about Tim Smyth’s working style, one particular image comes to mind. A man was crouching on the pavement late at night in a peaceful London side street, with sodium lamps overhead, arranging food scraps that had been salvaged from restaurant bins into tiny, meticulously constructed still lifes. Somewhere a few blocks away, traffic was humming. No help. No customer. Just a photographer using the same level of patience that is typically reserved for portrait sitters while handling discarded vegetables. You need a specific theory about the purpose of photography in order to reach that degree of stubbornness.
Born in Bristol in 1985 and trained at the London College of Communication, Smyth grew up in the genre at the same time that Instagram was teaching people how to filter faces, food, and weather into a pleasant, soft haze. His project, “Defective Carrots,” which involved driving hundreds of bruised, curved, knobbly carrots from a North Yorkshire farm and photographing them under controlled light in his studio for more than a year, came across almost as a rebuke. It was named one of the year’s best books by Martin Parr. People began to wonder what it meant to be photographable all of a sudden.
Even when the topic of his work completely shifts, that question still appears. He oversaw two concurrent projects at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto that appeared to be nearly unrelated on paper. Still the carrots. And My Son’s Absence, a series of deliberate, slow portraits and interviews with West African and Libyan men who had made it from Niger, Togo, Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone to the Spoleto suburbs. The jump appears dramatic. It isn’t in reality. Both projects inquire about who is properly examined and who is sorted out, but in different registers. He doesn’t appear to approach them as distinct issues.
The work on refugees is notable for what it purposefully avoids doing. No spectacle, no neat villains, and no shock framing. Instead of dramatizing, the photos observe. That restraint is practically unfeasible from a financial standpoint in a media landscape that rewards tragedy with a clear visual hook. He most likely loses reach as a result. He most likely has to pay commissions for it. However, it seems as though he has weighed the trade and determined that dignity is more valuable.
From a different perspective, In Your Absence employs the same reasoning. He spent six weeks working on a project in Italy while his partner emailed him photos of meals she prepared back in London, which he then reinterpreted using his own perspective. It appears to be a culinary project. Really, it isn’t. It’s about how when two people are no longer in the same kitchen, domestic life breaks down. In a way that photographers seldom let themselves be, the entire experience feels intimate. The majority don’t think the audience will sit through quiet content. He does.
This story also involves a business decision that is worth mentioning. Syria Relief benefited from The al-Assad Campaign’s 2014 print sales. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small gesture, but it conveys an understanding that photographs of other people’s sorrow carry a responsibility. This type of decision does not constitute a portfolio. It creates a habit.
The carrots in a Smyth exhibition are incredibly detailed and opulent. root hairs, soil, and light skin bruises. At first glance, they appear alien. Then a little unsettling. Then, somehow, lovely. The work’s subdued thesis appears to be that arc, from apathy to attention to a sort of tenderness. It remains to be seen if the documentary industry as a whole will follow him into that slower, less spectacular register. Most likely not on a large scale. However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that photographers who are being gathered by museums, discussed in seminars, and subtly copied by the younger generation tend to resemble Smyth more than those who are chasing the next big picture.
