ABAA member Raymond Smith (R.W. Smith Bookseller) recently published In Time We Shall Know Ourselves, a book of 52 photographs taken during his three-month road trip through the Eastern half of the United States in 1974. Publication of the book coincided with a traveling exhibition of the photographs that commenced at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in June. The exhibition will be on display at the Hickory Museum of Art from October 4, 2014-January 4, 2015; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL from April 23-August 23, 2015; and finally at the Georgia Museum of Art from October 25, 2015-January 3, 2016.

In addition to the 52 photographs printed in duotone, In Time We Shall Know Ourselves also includes three critical essays, Richard H. King’s “Mirror with a Memory”; Alexander Nemerov’s “First and Last: The Sequence of In Time We Shall Know Ourselves”; and Smith’s “Retrospect."

Nemerov writes,

The easiest thing to say about Raymond Smith is that he follows in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Evans was his photography teacher at Yale in the early 1970s and Frank’s book The Americans (1958) is a source Smith acknowledges for his own book. But neither of these associations touches the deepest energy of Smith’s photographs... Traveling far and wide, Smith sought out his subjects in a way reminiscent of Evans and Frank. But unlike those photographers he was animated by a sense of the town studio as the place and soul of his interstate pictures...In Time We Shall Know Ourselves is like other notable projects of the 1970s that asserted the power of the vernacular.

As always, the photographs truly speak for themselves, and you can view the exhibition online at Rediscovered Masters. 

Smith gave a talk, "I Am a Camera", at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in July, which you can listen to below.

Please contact Ray directly to inquire about purchasing a copy of In Time We Shall Know Ourselves.