Rodney Smith

A monograph on the world of American photographer Rodney Smith, acclaimed for iconic black and white images that combine portraiture and landscape. Published to accompany an exhibition at Palazzo Roverella, Italy, September 2025 - January 2026. Text in English and Italian. The work of Rodney Smith (1947–2016) is above all an invitation to insinuate oneself into a world suspended between illusion and reality. Far from the modern conventions of documentary photography or realism, Smith has created a unique language on the boundary between these two worlds. Each of his sublime, supreme images exerts a real fascination over the viewer, for they are the site of polarity and duality, of the utterance and its contradiction, of the place and its reverse. Rodney Smith is not content merely to document the world; he transforms it and magnifies it, and only photography is capable of delivering, in a flash, his strange visions, his kind of visual impulses, as stunning and explosive as if they were about to break the sound barrier. Text in English and Italian.