The work of photographer and Rhode Island School of Design professor Steven B. Smith (born 1963) chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate, wrote of his work, “Smith’s images record not so much a contrast as two violent absences joining as a single force. Landfill, seedling, turnabout, heating coil collude with the sky and mountains in a triumph of disproportion: scale not so much confused or lost as irrelevant.” Steven B. Smith: Your Mountain is Waiting documents the accelerating suburbanization of Smith’s native Utah. Peeling back the layers of westward expansion with equal parts subtlety and irony, Smith captures the new McMansions springing up against the rocky, rust-red mountains and deep blue skies of the West. Smith is equally attentive to the cast of characters that fill these new landscapes—the people that build them, and the people that live in them.
Steven B. Smith has received numerous grants and awards, including John Simon Guggenheim, Kittredge, and RISCA fellowships. His work has been widely exhibited and can be found in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His book, The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West, was published by Duke University Press in 2005. Smith received a BFA from Utah State University and an MFA from Yale. He is a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.