DESPITE BEEING identified with a type of image that is quintessentially traditional - not only through its subject matter, landscape and location, but by the curious calmness and stillness that pervades virtually all his photographs, be they architectural interiors or cascading water features in some rural parkland - Smith is actually the very model of a contemporary artist. A writer, painter, draughtsman, watercolourist, printmaker - one time fashion snapper for Vogue (briefly) - and architectural planner, Smith only conceded he was a photographer towards the end of his life, despite much acclaim and success in this field. By way of leading publishers clamouring for use of his photographic images, and a highly popular series of postcards issued by Gordon Fraser, Smith enjoyed a well-deserved, highly productive and satisfying decade immediately preceding his illness and death.
Although painting was his first love, Smith took photographs from the early 1930s with a particular, personal interest in the Northumberland miners and fish docks of Newcastle, and the circus and funfairs in and around London. When he married his second wife, the highly attractive and stellar Olive Cook (1912-2002) also a writer and painter, they devoted themselves to artistic endeavours in which photography - by his own reckoning - played only a minor role. However, this dismissive attitude to the photographic art, one he shared with Henri Cartier-Bresson, was belied by the numerous books he wrote on technique (for example: All the Photo Tricks, 1940, Focal Press) and his attention to the quality, and sheer quantity, of his own darkroom prints.
Edwin George Herbert Smith was born on 15th May 1912, in Canonbury, London. Educated at the Northern Polytechnic, he transferred to the architectural school at sixteen then won a scholarship to the Architectural Association, but for financial reasons gave up this course and worked as an architectural draughtsman for several years. In 1935 Smith married Rosemary Ansell, daughter of a confectioner, their son Martin being born in 1941. The marriage ended in divorce two years later and, in 1954, he married Olive Cook. In addition to his photographic output, throughout his life Smith was also a prolific creator of linocuts, drawings and paintings. He became ill in the Spring of 1971, but his cancer was not diagnosed until a few weeks before his death on 29th December.
Edwin and Olive's marriage was a blueprint for shared happiness and creativity. He became renowned for his photographs of architecture and landscape, both in Britain and Europe, and many were collaborations with his wife: his the photographs, hers the text. These books, now avidly sought out by collectors, include: English Parish Churches (1952), English Cottages and Farmhouses (1954), The English House Through Seven Centuries (1968), England (1971), Pompeii and Herculaneum (1960), Rome: From its Foundation to the Present (1971). The unrelenting scourge of modern life and its obsession with demolition has given an extra dimension to these images, as historical documents, and imbued them with a nostalgia probably not intended by the artist at the time. Edwin Smith has been referred to as the 'English Atget' on more than one occasion by critics, and not without reason.
As curator of the RIBA library, Robert Elwall is eminently well placed to provide the authoritative text on Edwin Smith's life and career. Over 60,000 Smith negatives are now at RIBA and Elwall has selected a glorious range of monochrome images beginning with the pre-War studies of circus and fair ground folk, through to the romantic - to modern eyes - studies of 1950s rural England with its cottages, historic houses and architecture devoid of overt tourism and the motor car. The third section of the book covers Smith’s extensive photo-essays outside the UK, notably Italy and France.
Olive left copious records, letters and archives on her death at 90 years old, and Elwall has been able to draw on a wealth of detail derived from these sources and Smith's own notebooks and diaries. These latter are replete with descriptions of equipment, printing and technical procedures (over which Smith took such pains) and so ensures that even the professional photographer will become engrossed in a world forever lost to digital progress. Olive Cook was an indefatigable champion of her husband's work and managed his estate with vigour, enabling his contribution to 20th century photography to be reassessed and duly placed within the pantheon of great image makers. Merrell and Robert Elwall do the artist full justice with this really authoritative and highly readable document.
