Henry Holmes Smith was an American photographer and one of most influential fine art photography teachers of the mid 20th century. He was inspired by the work that had been done at the German Bauhaus

Bauhaus

', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

 and in 1937 was invited to teach photography at the New Bauhaus

IIT Institute of Design

Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology , originally founded as the New Bauhaus, is a graduate school teaching systemic, human-centered design.- History :...

 being founded by Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...

 in Chicago. After World War II, he spent many years teaching at Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

. His students included Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry N. Uelsmann is an American photographer.Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan. When he was in high school, his interest in photography sparked. He originally believed that using a camera could allow him to exist outside of himself, to live in a world captured through the lens...

, Jack Welpot, and Betty Hahn.

Smith was often involved in the cutting edge of photographic techniques: in 1931 he started experimenting with high-speed flash photography of action subjects, and started doing color work in 1936 when few people considered it a serious artistic medium. His later images were nearly all abstract, often made directly (without a camera, i.e. like photograms), for instance images created by refracting light through splashes of water and corn syrup on a glass plate. However, although acclaimed as a photographic teacher, Holmes' own photographs and other images did not achieve any real recognition from his peers.

At the end of his career, Smith questioned the value of photographic education, noting that unlike, say, a medical degree, a degree in the fine arts didn't lead to some useful role in society.

Quotes

• "Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book, but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That’s the sort of thing that is bad education. I’d say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that’s good for photography."

• "People are competing to win at a game that is a loser's game. The game is to have better routine images than someone else's routine images. If you want a prescription for routine images, you just have to go through any student's portfolio."

External resources

• Camera-less Photographs: Light Abstraction, Three Light Abstractions, Phoenix (variation).
• Drawings of Light, role of Henry Holmes Smith in the history of photography.