Mike Smith is an American photographer. He was born in 1951 in Heidelberg, Germany. He served in the U.S. Army and was in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971. There he bought his first 35mm camera.
He earned a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1977. He took workshops with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. Tod Papageorge accepted him at Yale University, where he earned an MFA in photography in 1981. That year he became a professor of photography at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.
His book Streets of Boston (STANLEY/BARKER, 2021) has 124 pages. It collects early black-and-white photographs made in Boston in the 1970s. In 1976 he traded his 35mm Leica for a Linhof Press 23 camera. His work moved from spontaneous street photography to more intimate portraits. Mark Steinmetz suggested making the book.
Smith also published You're Not From Around Here: Photographs of East Tennessee (Center for American Places and Columbia College Chicago, 2004). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
