Henry Holmes Smith (1909,
Bloomington, Indiana
Bloomington is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County, Indiana, Monroe County in the central region of the U.S. state of Indiana. It is the List of municipalities in Indiana, seventh-largest city in Indiana and the fourth-largest outside ...
–1986) was an American photographer and a fine art photography teacher. He was inspired by the work that had been done at the German
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 200 ...
and in 1937 was invited to teach photography at the
New Bauhaus
Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech), founded as the New Bauhaus, is a graduate school teaching systemic, human-centered design.
History
The Institute of Design at Illinois Tech is a school of design ...
being founded by
Moholy-Nagy in Chicago. After World War II, he spent many years teaching at
Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
*Indiana Universit ...
. His students included
Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Norman Uelsmann (June 11, 1934 – April 4, 2022) was an American photographer.
As an emerging artist in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann received international recognition for surreal, enigmatic photographs (photomontages) made with his uniqu ...
,
Jack Welpott
Jack Welpott (April 27, 1923 – November 24, 2007) was an American photographer.
Biography
He was born in Kansas City on April 27, 1923, grew up in southern Indiana, and was educated at primary and secondary schools in Missouri, Illinois and ...
,
Robert W. Fichter,
Betty Hahn
Betty Hahn (born 1940) is an American photographer known for working in alternative and early photographic processes. She completed both her BFA (1963) and MFA (1966) at Indiana University. Initially, Hahn worked in other two-dimensional art mediu ...
and Jaromir Stephany.
Smith was often involved in the cutting edge of photographic techniques: in 1931 he started experimenting with high-speed flash photography of action subjects, and started doing color work in 1936 when few people considered it a serious artistic medium. His later images were nearly all abstract, often made directly (without a camera, i.e. like photograms), for instance images created by refracting light through splashes of water and
cliché verre
Cliché verre, also known as the glass print technique, is a type of "semiphotographic" printmaking. An image is created by various means on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film, and then placed on light sensitive paper in a ...
images with corn syrup on a glass plate. However, although acclaimed as a photographic teacher, Holmes' own photographs and other images did not achieve any real recognition from his peers.
At the end of his career, Smith questioned the value of photographic education, noting that unlike, say, a medical degree, a degree in the fine arts didn't lead to some useful role in society.
References
Much of the information in this article is based on an interview with Smith in ''Dialogue with Photography'' by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper (Thames & Hudson, 1979), 132–159.
External resources
HenryHolmesSmith.Comincludes images of his work and a short biography.
* Camera-less Photographs
Drawings of Light
role of Henry Holmes Smith in the history of photography.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Henry Holmes
1909 births
1986 deaths
20th-century American photographers
Indiana University faculty
Illinois Institute of Technology faculty