This is a nice conversation between Amy Stein and Geoff Smith I wanted to share with you, guys.

A little over a year ago I was in need of a digital assistant to help me improve my technical skills and prints. Joshua Lutz suggested I contact his friend Geoff Smith. And I'm really glad I did. Geoff whipped my work into shape, showing me how to improve my scanning and print quality in my preparation for my show at ClampArt this past fall.

Not only is Geoff a technical wiz and a patient teacher, he's a truly nice guy and a very talented photographer. His Signal Nodes series is thought provoking and smart. I asked Geoff if he would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when he agreed. 

AMY STEIN: Tell me a bit about your series Signal Nodes.

GEOFF SMITH: The photographs in this project look at the notion of home through images that suggest or evoke rather than document. The idea is that human perception will fill in the blanks when given a set of images that poke around the edges of a subject and synthesize a notion of the whole. Though each image is fully realized, to the extent that I could make it at any rate, they do have the properties of fragments for me, that sort of "half-remembered dream" thing. Hopefully they act on memory in an evocative way for others as they do for me.

I began by looking at a stack of images that I had made over the course of a year or so that had been giving me some trouble in terms of figuring out what they were about. I noticed that I had been photographing the same types of things over and over again, things like kitchen counters and backyards. I finally realized that I was responding to these types of scenes or objects because they reminded me of places that I'd lived, not the location so much as the surfaces, objects and textures. Once I realized this, I was able to give myself a "brief" of sorts to finish the project, concentrating on areas in and around where I live now, in Brooklyn.

Another thing I noticed in pursuing this project was that if I set out to exhaustively document a place, it lost this evocative feeling for me. If I kept it to making images of things that I responded to on a less conscious level then it seemed to work, to bring up these feelings of "home-ness" for me. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up, so I think on some level I don't have an ingrained sense of home as a place, more as a feeling or these fragmentary glimpses which the pictures try to capture. The other concept or theme that the work deals with is transmission, and I mean that in a very general sense. The idea of being transmitted oneself or of one's consciousness being sent from one place to another. Again, I think this comes of having never lived anywhere longer than about 4-5 years until after I graduated from college.

AS: What defines place for you? Location, objects, or experience?

GS: It's definitely the objects and details of a scene that put me in the mind of a place rather than the precise location. Also, the "realness" of a place doesn't matter to me as much as the details. Let me explain. While I was shooting this project, my wife and I would often, and still do, visit her grandmother who lives in Wilton, Connecticut. Wilton is what I would call "arch-suburbia," in many ways it is an archetypal bedroom/commuter community. It also has the quality of being somewhat frozen in time, looking vaguely like it could be almost anytime from about 1960 through about 1985. Now, of course, I've never lived there. I grew up in Westchester and Rockland counties in New York and eastern Pennsylvania, among other places. But, to me, Wilton looks more like the places I grew up in than the actual places themselves do, especially now. Using it as a stand-in, for my purposes, turned out to be more genuine than the real thing in terms of its ability to evoke these fragmented images of home.

More than this, I found that I often didn't really respond to a scene or object until after I had photographed it. That is to say, I would be drawn, somewhat ambivalently, to photograph a scene and then afterwards have a strong reaction to the photograph itself. I think part of what I was reacting to were properties that all photographs have: flatness, perspective, the relationship of objects to one another and to the frame's edge, etc. It was the "photographic-ness" that I found evocative.

AS: Your images seem to be using visual cues to lead the viewer toward an experiential Gestalt. We are enticed to form emotional wholes from the bit and parts of objects and places you photograph. Given that we are basically a confused mashup of personal and popular culture narrative, do you believe we are capable of having 'real' experiences with place or is it all transference?

GS: The motivations for making this work were about where and when I grew up as that relates to where I live now. Others who don't share my background will probably have vastly different associations in looking at the work. Hopefully the pictures are good enough in their own right -- as pictures -- to provide a worthwhile viewing experience for someone who didn't grow up in the northeast, in suburbia, in the 70s and 80s, etc. In terms of whether or not one experience or another is "real," as it relates to place, I don't think anyone can really say. It's too bound up with memory and subjectivity. Certainly some of what I'm photographing is related not to experiences that I had per se, but more to how I remember them. Since one of the supposedly useful properties of photography is as an aide-mèmoir, and since parents tend to compulsively photograph their children as they're growing up, I'm OK with the fact that what I might find evocative about my own work is related to the extent to which they reference family photographs that were made while I was growing up.

It's interesting that you used the word transference. Where I live now, in Brooklyn Heights, is widely thought of as a the first suburb in America. Traders who worked in Manhattan would pay fishermen to ferry them across the East River to and from the original Dutch town of Breuckelen (what is today Brooklyn Heights) in what could be called the first "commute." So, in some sense I've traded suburbia as it was in the 1970s and 80s for perhaps a more genuine or authentic form of suburbia, one where the "urb" in suburbia is overlaid or integrated with the way we live now. Obviously, Brooklyn today is a large city in its own right, but I think there is probably something to the idea that, when my wife and I moved here and planned to start a family, that I wanted my daughter to have this component of what I regarded as an essential characteristic of childhood (but, again, integrated with how I want to live as an adult).

It only takes a few minutes of scanning the walls of Aperture Gallery’s new installation to see that flamenco and the camera were meant for each other. Images by some of the grandees of photography, including Brassai, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath, and Lucien Clerguehang next to prints by “Photographer Unknown.” As depicted here, flamenco is performed in a dusty lot high above a hazy city; in a gypsy caravanserie on the edge of a rural village; on stage in a theater; and, of course, in dance studios where children learn the arts of their parents.

The exhibition covers the love affair that began not long after photography made its way to Spain. A studio portrait from 1858 shows a regal woman of a certain age dressed in fine clothes much like what is worn by flamenco dancers today. One of the great surprises in the show is a photograph of a Gypsy dancer whose exultant gesture signifies a fire within; it was made by the French painter Pierre Bonnardin 1901.

Like tango in Argentina, flamenco in Spain has been alternately celebrated and reviled, proudly performed and suppressed by despotic rulers. Originating in Gypsy and Moorish culture in southern Spain, it was celebrated at the turn of the 19th century, when it became wdely popular in Europe. During the Spanish Civil War, Flamenco was marginalized, then brought back as a signifier of national identity by the Franco regime in the 1950s.

When commercial jet flights began in the 1960s, making it possible for students to travel abroad, self-styled ethnomusicologists and photographers began to collect and catalogue this unique form of Spanish dance and music, making it more visible to the world at large. The music has become part of the “world music” category and has influenced some of the most popular performers today.

The fire and soul of flamenco comes through in these photographs, even in the few obligatory scenes of celebrities - notably a shot of The Beatles, in which John Lennon strikes a flamenco pose for the paparazzi. Around the same time, Xavier Miseracha, a well-known Catalan photographer, captured the passion of the dance as performed by Antonita La Singla.

No Singing Allowed, curated by Jose Lebrero Stals, opens tonight at Aperture Gallery from 6:00-8:00 pm. Pastora Galvan, an important new figure in flamenco dance, will perform at the opening. The exhibition is being presented in two sections, with an opening Friday, February 6, from 6:00-8:00 pm atInstituto Cervantes, where flamenco singer La Tremendita and guitarist Paco Cruz will perform. Both exhibitions continue through April 1, 2010.

Aperture Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, NY. 

Family Days takes place in the middle of a minor madhouse in the upper midwest. It is an autobiographical project based on family, fatherhood, and young sons. The photographs describe the fatigue and tension that develop when the arrival of my third son upsets an already fragile domestic peace. Constant activity, endless jockeying for attention, and a rising testosterone level spin us closer to the edge of physical and psychological exhaustion. Set in common centers of family life: the kitchen, living room, backyard, and bedroom- these photographs reflect the craziness in our lives as the house is taken over by three boys.