When the artist Paul Anthony Smith sees an abandoned photo album on the street, he snaps it up like a lucky penny. On an afternoon in his studio in the Bronx, New York, he is surprised to learn that I didn't do the same when I encountered one recently. "Oh no, you take it," he says disapprovingly. "It's so sad no one was able to adopt those images." For Smith, these keepsakes represent an antidote to the scourge of iPhone photos; they are tactile and intimate yet anonymous.
The Jamaican-born artist is constantly filling his own albums with personal snapshots from his 35mm camera: a dinner party in London, Carnival festivities in Trinidad and Tobago, a beach day in St Thomas with his wife and children. Sometimes, he blows them up and uses them as the basis for large-scale compositions.
Smith's distinctive style comes from the way he adds layers - spray-painted chain-link fences, tiny holes in the shape of breeze blocks, three-dimensional objects such as flags - to create distance between the source image (always his own) and the viewer. For many artists, the medium is the message. For Smith, the mediation is the message. In other words, the way he obscures his imagery is just as important as the imagery itself. "Sometimes, it's like, 'Ah, I'm revealing too much,'" he says. "I pick over some of my works . . . to disguise and protect the information that's beneath."
