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Aline Smithson

Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice examines the archetypal foundations of the creative impulse and she uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Rupersburg, and Charles Garabedian. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor working alongside some the greats of fashion photography, Smithson returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice.

She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Arnika Dawkins Gallery in Atlanta. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Harper’s, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.

Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. She has been an educator at the Los Angeles Center of Photography since 2001 and her teaching spans the globe. In 2012, Smithson received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50.

In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to a series of portraits for the Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In the Fall of 2018 and again in 2019, her work was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2019, Kris Graves Projects commissioned her to create the book LOST II: Los Angeles that is now sold out. Peanut Press Publishing released her monograph, Fugue State in Fall of 2021, also sold out. Her books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. In 2022, Smithson was honored as a Hassleblad Heroine. With the exception of her cell phone, she only shoots film.

Artist Statement

Paradise

Every summer, my family and I travel to a beautiful lake south of Boston, not far from the Cape, to dip our feet in ancestral waters. My husband’s great-grandparents built homes on this lake over a century ago, and little has changed since then. For almost three decades, we’ve packed up our expectations and headed east to layer new memories onto the old.


There is something magical knowing that a hundred years later, we are taking pleasure in the same activities, swimming in the same water, running up and down the same stairways, and enjoying the same vistas from a house that has the traces of each preceding generation.


When I first started to photograph the lake many years ago, I worked exclusively in black and white. The limited palette seemed to echo the ancient family photos that lined the walls and bring sense of history to the work, but no matter how I capture this annual experience, it remains a magical corner of the world that I pack in my heart each time I leave. It is my paradise.

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Release Date: June 14, 2024

My husband’s great grandmother planted extensive gardens on the property, with a staircase that leads down to a small stage. Large round cement balls flanked the stairs and somehow, one of the balls made its way into the lake. I saw the ball as a perfect metaphor for the earth, for the future and all its possibilities. I asked my niece to stand on the ball as she was on the cusp of growing up, still filled with unfettered hopes and dreams.

Cement Ball, 2007

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