Rodney Smith looks like a lawyer or a banker, possibly an academic. "I like that, actually," he says. "I don't want to look like a photographer."

     Smith was in Bangkok recently to open "The Photographs of Rodney Smith" at Timothy Yarger Fine Art at the Promenade. The show continues through July 15.

Photographers all over the world look the same, he says. Their uniform is very comfortable clothes with loads of pockets.

"I'd rather somebody take me for a tourist just taking pictures."

He's always dressed in his own way, though, right from youth when it was a way of avoiding confrontation with his father, a powerful businessman.

"The outside of me looked very predictable and normal, but the inside was radical and very different."

Now 58, Smith always dresses the same and uses the same camera equipment and the same 135mm film - never Polaroid or digital.

And, fittingly enough for a specialist in black-and-white photography, he watches nothing but movies made before 1947.

Smith enjoys the depth of black-and-white images. With colour photos, the viewer is often distracted before seeing the true subject.

"Seeing it in black-and-white is seeing it differently from the real world," he says.

When his clothes wear out, he replaces them with identical duds, and so it is for the tools of his trade. He's used the same Leica model and 50mm lens for three decades.

"If you drive a race car, you have the best car you can possibly get, one you can always trust."

And what about his driving technique?

"If I want to take a picture of you, it should have the same relationship to you as I do when I'm talking to you. I'm trying to recreate with the camera what I feel when I talk to you."

Smith says everyone has the potential to be a good photographer, but the hard part is being able to transfer one's perceptions onto a two-dimensional piece of paper so that they still have a personal impact on the viewer.

"It's not intellectual problem but an emotional one, to be in touch with who you are as a person emotionally and to be able to open yourself and disclose that in the photographs. Most people are afraid to do that."

Smith's pictures have been hailed as an artful fusion of substance and style. Their strong sense of nostalgia and romance evoke drama, an atmospheric narrative.

His 1999 shot "Twins in tree, Snedens Landing, New York" has an elegantly dressed gentleman looking up at a huge tree in which a second gentleman is perched.

The composition, the magnitude of the tree, the mysterious circumstances and the silent conversation between the men make for compelling viewing.

Smith's father was the president of Anne Klein, the American fashion house, so he knew about photography early on. Yet he didn't study any technique until he was pursuing a master's degree in theology at Yale University.

He was inspired by the photos he saw at New York's Museum of Modern Art and published two books of his own work, "The Land of Light" - the result of three months spent in Jerusalem in 1975 - and "The Hat Book" in 1993.

His clients include Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Ralph Lauren, W magazine and the New York Times Magazine.

For Smith, natural light and composition are the primary factors in photography; technique is just a tool and it shouldn't be allowed to get in the way.

He shoots with spontaneity. Given an assignment, he might spend ages scouting out the right location, but having found it, it only takes minutes to get the shot - possibly seconds.

Sirinya Wattanasukchai

The Nation