Bruce Museum Artist’s Talk: “I Am a Camera,” by Raymond Smith

New Haven photographer Raymond Smith will present a lecture titled “I Am a Camera,” which will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. The reception is at 3:00 pm, followed the lecture at 3:30 pm.

Free for Museum members and students (with valid ID); non-members $15 (includes Museum admission). Advance registration is required, as seating is limited. Be sure to sign in to receive your member discount.

The talk is in conjunction with the exhibition, In Time We Shall Know Ourselves, on display in the Bruce Museum’s Bantle Lecture Gallery from April 7 through June 3, 2018.

Inspired by the photographs taken in the American South in the 1930s by Walker Evans, a teacher and mentor of Smith at Yale University, as well as by Robert Frank’s The Americans(1958), in the summer of 1974 Smith embarked on a photographic expedition of his own. Smith traveled with his friend Suzanne Boyd in an aging Volkswagen from New England through the South and into the Midwest, camping and photographing people and places he encountered during the three-month journey.

Intending to write a Ph.D. thesis in American Studies, Smith instead channeled his intense curiosity about his country and its inhabitants into a moving suite of portraits, works that are at once down-to-earth, melancholy, and filled with surprise.

The exhibition features 52 photographs, most of which are vintage prints. Smith also has independently produced a book (In Time We Shall Know Ourselves, Rediscovered Masters, 2014) that illustrates the photographs with insightful commentary by two historians of art and culture.