Every couple of years, husband-and-wife photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee pack up their Bucks County, Pa., photography lab into a 1978 Land Rover with a tent on the roof and send it in a shipping container to Iceland.
The rocky, open, dramatically lighted terrain has been an artistic inspiration for the couple, now in their 70s, on excursions since 2004. They spend eight weeks roaming the remote lagoons and farmlands as well as the rugged shorelines and small fishing villages, lugging their hulking, 8-by-10-inch-view cameras until something calls to them visually. Then they work side by side, each capturing the landscape in large-format, black-and-white photographs — specifically, gelatin silver chloride contact prints, something of a lost art.
Their work — featured in more than 140 museums worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — is on display this weekend at the Photo L. A. art fair.
Smith and Chamlee’s images are closer to abstraction than landscape photography. Each picture is emotionally resonant, not necessarily a literal reflection of the subject but an expression of what inspired it — the geometric lines, shapes and shadows giving the image a new narrative.
“I like to say we photograph space, not things,” Smith says, adding that he and Chamlee feel a kinship with photographer Edward Weston.
“We just look and try to be open to new visual discoveries,” Chamlee says, “and you do that by exploring and just responding when it feels right. Because every day is different, the light is different. That low arc of the sun makes magical, arctic light.”
Stateside, the couple is just as prolific. Chamlee is also a painter who recently has been combining sumi ink drawings with watercolors. She spent a year documenting a Bucks County woman’s idiosyncratic holiday lawn decorations. Smith photographed inmates in solitary confinement at Maricopa County 4th Avenue Jail in Phoenix. One portrait was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C., as part of the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. They’ve also traveled the globe, making photographs from southern Oregon to the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana to the Tuscan countryside.
But Iceland’s natural and city landscapes are a hallmark of their joint photography practice.
“Iceland was for both of us a revelation — unexpected and beautiful and energizing and surreal,” Chamlee says. “Though we work in different ways, we both photograph things we feel deeply connected to, things we want to know on a more personal level just by being deeply observant and being with it, so we can respond to it. Iceland was just a great adventure.”
