Graham Smith (photographer)


Graham Smith is a photographer from Middlesbrough, England, who was particularly active in photographing Middlesbrough and the north-east of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.

Life and work

Smith studied at the Middlesbrough College of Art and later the Royal College of Art. In the 1970s he was among the photographers central to the Side Gallery, and created a series of photographs that showed working-class people in the north of England that were in a documentary style but were in fact montages. Work from the 1980s would show people within townscapes, and in the words of David Alan Mellor, were "atmospheric, steeped in popular memory — dark, romantic places with all the melancholy attributed to Eugène Atget's familiar locations". Another Country, a joint exhibition with Chris Killip held in London in 1985, was generally well reviewed but to some appeared passé in the light of the new "postmodern" work of Martin Parr and others.
Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker. His writing has appeared in Granta.
Smith's photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Exhibitions