Michael P. Smith is a New Orleans naive and
award-winning professional freelance photographer. His special
interest for nearly 40 years has been the music, culture and
folklife of New Orleans and Louisiana. He is well known for
documenting New Orleans social club parades and jazz funerals,
neighborhood Mardi Gras traditions, Spiritual Church ceremonies,
and many of the city and state's renowned jazz, blues rhythm
and blues, and gospel musicians. Smith has photographed
at every New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since it
began in 1970 and was honored in 2004 with a major
grandstand exhibition and photo kiosks placed around the fairgrounds.
Smith's work has been presented at the Museum
of American History (Smithsonian Institution), the International
Center for Photography in New York and the LeRoy Neiman Gallery
at Columbia University, as well as numerous other museums,
galleries and jazz festivals in America and Europe. A major
retrospective of his work was presented in 1999 at the Contemporary
Arts Center in New Orleans.
Smith's photographs are in the permanent
collections of the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and, locally, the
Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Museum of
Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Louisiana State
Museum.
Michael P. Smith photographs grace the covers
of many CDs and record albums; illustrate numerous books and
magazine articles published in America and Europe; and are
in continual demand for documentary films produced at home
and abroad. He has received two Photographer's Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts and his prints have
toured worldwide through the United States Information Agency
(USIA) and the Louisiana State Museum. Professionally, he
was a location assignment photographer for Black Star, the
noted New York booking agency, for over 20 years. He has photographed
in Cuba on three different occasions, documenting laborers,
music in the streets and folk religions rarely captured on
film.
Smith's work is represented through five
photography books including Spirit World: Pattern in the
Expressive Folk Culture of African American New Orleans;
A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music; New
Orleans Jazz Fest: A Pictorial History; Jazz Fest Memories;
and Mardi Gras Indians. The latter is a visual and
sociological history of the unique masking and musical traditions
still alive in New Orleans' older black neighborhoods.
In the last few years, Mike Smith has been
honored with numerous awards. He received a Lifetime Achievement
Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 2002
and was named Music Photographer of the Year by Offbeat
magazine. In 2004, he received a Mayor's Arts Award from the
Arts Council of New Orleans and a Clarence John Laughlin Lifetime
Achievement Award from the New Orleans/Gulf South chapter
of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). In
2005, he received the Delgado Society Award (New Orleans Museum
of Art), the first photographer to be so honored.
"The
camera is an extension of my knowledge of the inner workings
of the community that I have come to understand over a twenty-five
year period. It's my art, my subjective view of the world
I'm experiencing." ~ Michael P. Smith, 1968
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