MARTIN SMITH

This Elegant Hope

21 Jul 2026 – 08 Aug 2026

Stories Follow Us


Many moons ago, publications like America’s LIFE magazine or here in Australia, PIX, were based on the photojournalistic co-dependence of image and text, with each article driven by a carefully orchestrated combination of story and image sequence. Martin Smith’s work is similarly underpinned by the dialogue between the written word and photography, but in his practice the two exist independently, before coming together in a delicate dance to create new meanings. There is no relationship between the domestic setting captured in Oysters (2026), for example, and the story contained within it. However, by playing with these interdependent codes and ways of understanding the world, Martin creates an imaginative space for the viewer where entirely new narratives and ways of seeing become possible.

Martin’s series Naked People of Taigum (2023- ) emerged from the artist’s experience of working in a one-hour photo lab in the outer Brisbane suburb of Taigum in the 1990s. Having access to people’s photographic memories enabled him to recognise a shared language of familiar events—the birthdays, holidays and everyday shenanigans caught in their snapshots—and the way in which we pose (and compose) ourselves for the camera according to different occasions. The nudes that sometimes appeared within these camera rolls also revealed their own language – in their playful responses to the camera, in the obvious trust between the photographer and subject, and in their picturing of a private/public moment. In Martin’s ode to these joyful interludes, language becomes fragmented and unreadable as individual letters decorate and seemingly feather the naked figures at the centre of each image. Like the dissembling of language that occurs in these works, these images also push against the reproducibility of photography by creating unique three-dimensional objects that are at once both image and form. While family photographs are so deeply connected to the stories we tell about them, these intimate moments are about the stories we generally don’t and probably shouldn’t share.


Kelly Gellatly