A mobile phase

Spots of pure colour: blue, green, pink. Silhouettes of tombstones dissolve into almost invisible contours. Trees and light appear with blinding glare. Using the advantages of digital photography, Smith transforms the space until the photograph begins to lose one of its expected characteristics: the captured moment.

These images preserve not a single moment, but a process. The world in them is in a mobile phase of formation and formlessness, in constant exchange. The cemetery’s inhabitants lose one form and take on another: from human, to earth, to flora, to fauna, with most time spent between states.

Landscape and matter

Smith makes it impossible to determine the exact boundaries of her landscapes. The image holds abstraction and documentary evidence at the same time. Stone, inscription, leaf, flare, grave, path, and optical accident belong to one surface.

The Marxist pilgrimage site in Highgate Cemetery appears here as an ever-changing place, while also becoming a universal image of a cemetery. It is specific and unstable, historical and atmospheric, material and strangely unmoored from ordinary time.

After the graveyard image

There is a long tradition of graveyard depictions and death scenes, from Romantic landscapes to post-mortem photography. Smith’s works stand within this tradition while also resisting its usual stillness.

Her method allows her to express the dualism of otherworldliness and reality. The camera’s gaze does not stop at tombstones and graves. It keeps moving further, through light, surface, vegetation, inscription, and distortion, showing a journey from one matter to another: the endless journey of the soul.