“Through a combination of text and image my work strives to reveal the forces that combine to create the narratives of our lives. I write autobiographical stories that are hand cut out of vernacular photographs to represent the unique and universal moments that make our lives memorable. My work presents photographic moments that are read through the conventions of the novel and film as opposed to traditional photography.”

Martin Smith’s artwork focuses on those small moments that glance into a life. Tending to gather photographs, as opposed to taking them, his works as a consequence offer wry observations rather than grand statements. The loss or absence inherent in photographic images, which are suggestive of another time and place, is echoed in the physical loss of the words cut into the surface of the works. One story is inscribed on another, just like one memory is laid upon another or one version of a story embellishes another. The resulting works are replete with the same ambiguity, melancholy and richness as memory.

Martin Smith is an Australian photographer who combines words and images to explore family, memory, loss and identity. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Griffith University and teaches in the photographic department at the Queensland College of Art/Griffith University. His works have been exhibited internationally at the Hong Kong Art Fair, Photo Paris, Hous Projects in New York and Photo LA.

In Australia he has exhibited at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. His work is held in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, Monash City Gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Artbank and private collections in Australia, Hong Kong, France and the United States.

He has been awarded the Veolia Prize, the Clayton Utz Travelling Scholarship and the Prometheus Award.

In 2008 he released a monograph titled “Martin Smith, photographs, In response to.”