Photo Journal Monday: Sarah Phyllis Smith

Thinking of You, 2016

SLOW BURN

 My work is grounded in photography’s inherent relationship with nostalgia and the ways in which a photograph can ask us to look backwards while remaining grounded in the present. Stemming from autobiographical experiences, Slow Burn explores expectations of and attachment to personal photographic images through a slow and considered documentation of personal objects, interior spaces, and the landscape. 

My Mother Calls This a Tchotchke, 2016

Each image functions as a timestamp and landmark that exists beyond a known chronology.

Bistineau, 2016

I’m working to create images that achieve in moments the same weight that is gained from an image or object that is lived with over time. 

Sill Sizzling After All These Years, 2015

In their accumulation, a larger narrative that blends truth, poetry, and abstraction hums beneath the surface. I’m interested in how the space within a photograph becomes a stage in which the past, present, and future become the same moment. 

Challenger, 2018

Sarah Phyllis Smith (b. 1986 Middletown, NY) is a photographer and educator based in Utica, NY where she is Assistant Professor of Photography at PrattMWP. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Where the Great Lakes Leap to the Sea at The Shed Space in Brooklyn, NY and Fish Hotel at Vanderbilt University. Her work has also recently shown at Perspectives Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Ground Floor Gallery (Nashville), Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta), Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago), Wedge Projects (Chicago). Her work has been featured by through several online and print publications including Silver Eye Center for Photography, From Here On Out, Don’t Take Pictures Magazine, Light Leaked, Vulgaris Magazine, Photo-Emphasis, Incandescent Magazine, and was featured on the cover of Iranian literary magazine, Dastan. 

Corner, 2016

Click here to see more Sarah’s work.