The Photographs of Clare Smart
© Clare Smart
About This Exhibition:
Sometimes when you walk down a street, look out a window, sit on a bench and watch; you see things – spaces, objects, relationships, colors, and light – found in the world around you. Those are quiet moments set aside for seeing and experiencing.
The photographs of Clare Smart appear to emerge out of those quiet moments. Her photographic work in the divided city of Gornji Wakuf-Uskoplje, Bosnia, could have taken-on the less quiet format of the traditional documentary style, one that we are familiar with and have experienced their dissemination through various platforms and formats. Tracing the photographic image from the early war photographs of the mid-1800s. to Robert Capa and Susan Meiselas in the 20th century, and most recently the i-Reporter, we learned to read the codes of documentary photography and reproduce them quit well. Clare Smart offers a set of codes that talk to us through a different voice.
Clare’s work evolves out of a paradigm whose boundaries are set by patient observation and stillness. She offers us a different way of understanding a place, its history, and the people who did and still inhabit it. Yes, it was the location of a horrific war in the 1990s, neighbors and friends fighting each other, destroying the sense of place and self.
The photographs of Clare Smart take us not to the destroyed building, gravestones, or damaged people. She takes us to a place that allows us to look, construct our own feelings, moments, and sense of place.
VASA Exhibitions is happy to present her work to you as part of the Witness Series. The e-catalog as demonstrated by the menu to your left provides a number of resources to ground your thinking, and your visual experience, around the work of Clare Smart.
After some time the exhibition will be moved intact to the VASA Exhibition Archives where, like past exhibitions, will remain as a unit for future review and research.
© Clare Smart
We welcome your comments.
VASA Exhibitions are the result of various curators, artist, and photographers.
Roberto Muffoletto
Curator and VASA Director
All images in this exhibition: © Clare Smart