Tim Smyth’s work contains a certain kind of tension that you experience before you fully comprehend it. The Bristol-born documentary photographer created two sets of images during his stay in Spoleto for the Festival dei Due Mondi, which at first glance appeared to be completely unrelated to one another. One was a set of portraits of carrots. The other captured the silent, worn-out expressions of refugees reaching the periphery of Europe. They were odd together. They made a sort of brutal sense when combined.
Artists are affected by Spoleto itself. Giancarlo Menotti, a composer, established the Umbrian hill town as a major arts destination in 1958. It has a way of bringing seemingly unrelated things closer together. Sol LeWitt made it his permanent home. On a cobblestone alleyway surrounded by her own sculptures, Anna Mahler maintained her studio. Contradictions were always welcome at the Festival dei Due Mondi, also known as the Festival of Two Worlds. Smyth entered that tradition and fully embraced it.
Formally titled as part of his Defective Carrots project, the images depict vegetables that failed commercial grading, including twisted, forked, and scarred roots that were removed from the ground and thrown away before anyone could consume them. They were photographed by Smyth with the same solemnity and attention to detail that he applies to human subjects. Carefully lit, tightly framed, and given room to just be. He treats something that most people would discard without a second glance with such dignity that it’s difficult to ignore.
It turns out that everything he does is motivated by that instinct. His approach to refugee photography is the same: it is slow, patient, and refuses to reduce its subjects to crisis symbols. Smyth’s work tends to find the commonplace moment inside the overwhelming one, whereas much photojournalism covering displacement leans toward the spectacular or the tragic. a specific phrase. a bag that was held. The manner in which a person sits when unsure of their destination. You get the impression that he is more interested in providing you with enough visual information to feel something genuine than in dictating how you should feel.
It’s still unclear whether the pairing in Spoleto was an intentional provocation or something that just happened as a result of the work. Smyth appears to be especially resistant to that type of editorial packaging, and artists don’t always explain themselves. Putting these two projects side by side produced a third thing: a question about value, about which objects and lives are seen and which are sorted out and thrown away before the frame even closes.
This kind of unplanned collision is made possible by the Mahler & LeWitt Studios residency program, which has welcomed composers, sculptors, writers, and curators from all over the world since 2010. The connection between the carrot work and the refugee work might not have been apparent to Smyth himself in the absence of Spoleto’s unique atmosphere, which includes its long artistic memory, festival energy, and slightly suspended sense of time. At their best, residencies help artists become aware of what they are already doing.
Photographers who play it safe are not likely to receive Martin Parr’s endorsement, and Smyth’s work has been added to the collections of MoMA and Yale. However, the Spoleto duality persists. Sitting in the same room are two subjects who shouldn’t be together, but they insist on doing so.
FAQs
Q1. What two projects did Tim Smyth produce during his Spoleto residency?
He made carrot portraits and documentary photographs of refugees arriving in Europe.
Q2. What is the Defective Carrots project?
It portrays commercially rejected, misshapen carrots with the same dignity as human subjects.
Q3. Where did Tim Smyth complete this residency?
At the Mahler & LeWitt Studios during Spoleto’s Festival dei Due Mondi, Italy.
Q4. What connects Smyth’s vegetable work and his refugee photography thematically?
Both examine subjects that are overlooked, discarded, or denied visibility by mainstream systems.
Q5. Whose collections hold Tim Smyth’s work?
Yale University and MoMA have both acquired photographs from his documentary projects.
