Stafford Hiroshi Smith
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
The working title of this body of is called scrollscapes. These are spontaneous views of cities that are meant to capture the all-at-once sensory overload that one experiences when they encounter the action packed urban environment. I take the photos with an antique Zeiss Ikon that allows me to overlap frames. I find this a fun way to do street photography and to make sense of new places that I find myself in. I hope one day to photograph Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo.
Stafford Hiroshi Smith is a 4th generation Japanese-American. His love of archaic art processes infuses his work as he strives to blend old with new to create tactile and thought-provoking imagery. Stafford was born in Seattle, but grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York and studied art at Wesleyan and Cornell Universities. His influences are diverse: Hieronymus Bosch, Eikoh Hosoe, Botticelli, Andy Warhol, and Maggie Taylor to name a few.
A ten-year detour into the strange world of Japanese broadcast television took Stafford away from the traditional artworld, but placed him well into the world of the surreal. Many of his ideas are partially inspired by this hiatus that took him everywhere from a cat circus in Key West, to the Republican Convention in Houston, to a celebrity sports show in Tokyo. It was after this period that Stafford entered graduate school and immersed himself into photography full time.
Over the past few years, Stafford has become fascinated with the visual remnants of his bi-racial heritage and has been using the power of Photoshop to piece together a digital quilt of his past. This hodgepodge also includes his own photographs and the stray odd thrift shop find as he constructs his own version of his heritage. He currently teaches photography at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI.
