Photo essay Photojournalism

The magazine of the photo-essay

February 2020 issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

For four decades Mike Smith has photographed people living in the Southern Appalachian region, their lifestyles, and their land. Warning Shotsis a collection of recent photographs from that region edited during the 2016 presidential election cycle. The selection is a response to Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric and subsequent leadership. The works contend with sexism, homophobia, racism, misogyny, violence against women, gun violence, ignorance, intolerance, and hate. “I am lost, says the cat—and these days, who isn’t? Certainly, Mike Smith is lost. But then, alienation is a condition from which he has benefited artistically throughout much of his career. A Northerner living, teaching, and photographing in eastern Tennessee over the past four decades, he has operated as something of a stranger in a strange land, maintaining an eye that is perpetually new and fascinated by this rural place and its inhabitants. He has brought a fresh, perhaps even genre-making, vision to the buildings, the roadsides, the people, and—most complicatedly— the roughshod landscapes of Appalachia. In all these things, he has held to delicate balances of form and color, humor and sadness, image and symbol.” –from the essay by Diana C. Stoll

by Mike Smith

Erwin, TN 2018 © Mike Smith

Carter County, TN 2013 © Mike Smith

Watauga, TN 2014 © Mike Smith