Untitled No. 4 (Equivalents), 2011

"I remember the moment I first saw Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents series. I was a sophomore in college. I had just left my art history class, and I was sitting outside the science hall, skipping ahead to look through the small photography section in the back of the Jansen. I loved the image and was stunned to learn that such a simple concept was revolutionary for photography at that time. When I came upon this stack of periodicals at The New School in New York twenty years later, it was a reprieve for me from the city and the dizzying words, letters, numbers, and decimals I typically decipher." —Mickey Smith Aperture is excited to offer this limited-edition print by Mickey Smith created especially for our collecting audience. As a cultural archaeologist, Smith has focused her recent work on photographing bound periodicals, viewing them as fossil records of the twentieth century unknowingly left behind. She is fascinated by the idea that while the library was once the source of culture, it is now a cemetery for the written word. This body of work explores themes of association and disassociation, as each set of periodicals represented a tangible common culture, unifying communities of readers with shared interests and identities. Now twenty-first-century viewers are more likely to see their own inherited history within the periodicals rather than the written content.

Pigment Print
Image Size: 16 x 12 inches
Paper Size: 20 x 16 inches
Edition of 15 + 4 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Mickey Smith (b. 1972, Duluth, Minnesota) received a BA in Photography from Minnesota State University, Moorhead, in 1994. Smith has received the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography and grants from Forecast Public Art Affairs, CEC ArtsLink, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has exhibited in New York, China, and Russia. In 2010, her work was selected as one of the forty best permanent public artworks in the United States by the Americans for the Arts. Smith is represented by Invisible-Exports, New York.