In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: Photographs by Raymond Smith

In the summer of 1974, a young man drove an aging Volkswagen from New England through the South and into the Midwest, camping and photographing people and places along the way to California. The car died in Kansas City and Raymond Smith took the train home to New Haven, Connecticut, where he printed some of the 750 exposures he had made with his Rolleiflex and Minolta twin-lens cameras. Few of these rare prints had been exhibited or published until this exhibition. The 52 images selected reflect the subjects, places and people Smith encountered.

Walker Evans and Robert Frank have informed Smith's work, but this exhibition stands as an independent statement about the United States and about photography in Smith's times and places. Smith has written that his photography is "more closely related to literature, especially fiction ... than it is to the other visual arts," and that the "portrait is primary, and the photograph is a short story exploding beyond its frame." The exhibition is organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.