Seton Smith

Smith’s large photographic images of places devoid of human presence are mounted on a stiff support and mercifully left unprotected by reflective glass. More like a painting than a photograph, they hover just a bit off the white walls of the gallery. Their delicate surfaces, which resemble paintings in scale, are left exposed, and this adds much to the aching feelings engendered by them. Through this exposure, they invite a search for a “pure” opticality, an issue essential to formalist minimal painting back in the 1970s.