Best of Utah 2006, Best Utah-Related Photograph “Photographing Utah’s red-rock country and other natural landscapes is so old hat. Inspired by Robert Frank’s immortal photography collection The Americans, American Fork native Smith instead takes us deep into the metamorphosis of the American West from desert landscape into suburban real-estate mega-development ghost towns. People live here, of course. But does the sculpted urban landscape have a soul? You’ll either find these photographs of Southern California and Southern Utah banal and empty, or spooky and unsettling. Either way, you’ve understood Smith’s visual message.” - , Salt Lake City Weekly
“Say you’re a landscape photographer in the West. Say you’d like to call yourself an artist. Aspire toward a body of work that is both original and emotive. You’ve picked yourself a hard row to hoe. At first glance, the entrenched visual vocabulary of big beautiful snowcapped mountains and Sensia-blue lakes disallows both originality and emotion. Does the world really need another calendar shot of the Tetons? The trick is always to find some new way of looking at the same old horizon. In this context, Steven B. Smith’s recent collection of black and white images, The Weather and a Place to Live is a cool and cerebral compromise, a sharp spray of water, an artful kick in the ass.” - Allen Jones, New West
“Steven B. Smith looks at the suburban sprawl of Utah, California, and Colorado and sees waste, hubris, folly, and great formal beauty. . . . [T]hese photographs set up a tension between the sadness inherent in the rampant ‘Californization’ of the West and the machine-like but also strangely organic beauty to be found in the process. Smith’s work, and his book, are both disturbing and lovely.” - R. K. Dickson, The Bloomsbury Review
"[A] rebellious, defiant vitality rooted in the American suburban West. . . . Smith's black-and-white photographs [include] stark expanses where the monumental blankness of a Utah or Colorado sky meets the equally blank geometry of irrigation pipes of two-car garages. Between mountains and fences, between a tremendous rock face and giant stack of plywood, Smith's images record not so much a contrast as two violent absences joining as a single force. Landfill, seedling, turnabout, heating coil collude with the sky and mountains in a triumph of disproportion: scale not so much confused or lost as irrelevant. . . ." - Robert Pinsky, Slate
"[C]ompelling, often stunning. . . . Smith's photographs of this constructed landscape confront us with the beauty of images as images, yet push us to reflect on the massive devastation possible in the act of choosing a place to live. The deeper cumulative effect, as Smith shows, is that this commercial and geographic devolution leaves no sense of home, and in many cases no plant or animal life, only the weather and a place to live."
- John F. Barber, Leonardo Reviews
"Documenting suburbia's march into the Western wilds, Steven B. Smith finds art in the land even as it's being tamed." - Lynne Heffley, Los Angeles Times
"Smith . . . intersperses artistic photography to show the beauty in these popular developments, such as a series he has of debris catches, sandbags, and runoff pipes. This, it seems, is his method of coping with the new landscape. . . . [A]n excellent warning: suburbia is coming and you can't stop it." - Alex Starace, Rain Taxi
"Smith takes on the burbs and the juxtaposition of beauty and the beast. . . . Man's step on this land has not always been light, but it sometimes has been memorable." - Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News
"Stucco, acres of cinderblock, and big smoggy skies make for dramatic scenes in The Weather and a Place to Live." - Anneli Rufus, East Bay Express
"Working in the tradition of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, Smith has poked around construction sites from southern California to Utah with his view camera to observe the construction of walls that appear to define a gated community and the netting that covers a barren hillside where planned shrubbery will soon grow.The project sounds earnest, but through sharp description Smith manages to wring wry humor and a sad beauty out of the orthogonal walls and sinuous paths that overtake the ragged landscape." - Blake Eskin, Newsday
“Smith won the prize for his intelligent choice of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance. His work is by turns humorous and piteous, elegiac and ironic, and cumulatively very powerful for he has shaped an essay from aesthetically elegant, delicately nuanced pictures that are pitch perfect, in the spirit of the American West and in keeping with its long history of fine photographs.” - Maria Morris Hambourg, Prize Judge
“These images create a portrait of the systems of control which prepare the land for habitation and also guard them against nature. In making these photographs I wanted the manmade and natural elements of the landscape within each picture to communicate in a more extended and elaborate dialogue.” - Steven B. Smith
