A picture is worth a thousand books

Arts | February 21st, 2025

By John Showalter

john.d.showalter@gmail.com

Everyone has heard the adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” However, it is safe to say there are far more than a thousand in Mickey Smith’s photographs. When one hears about photography exhibitions, one often thinks of subject matter ranging from architecture to nature to people. In Smith’s case, she has spent years chronicling the changing landscape of libraries and their contents.

Originally from Duluth, Minnesota, Smith knew from the moment that she saw her 6th grade teacher bring in his amateur photography to show the class that she wanted to pursue photography. She learned from Don McRaven and Wayne Goodmanson in the photography department at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), graduating in 1994. After graduating from MSUM, the director of the Plains Art Museum at the time, reached out to Smith and asked if she wanted a job with the “Save Outdoor Sculpture” program. This involved documenting sculptures in northern Minnesota. From there, she became involved with the “Rolling Plains” program, teaching and working in museums for 10 years.

Her photography has been exhibited throughout the United States, China, Russia and New Zealand/Aotearoa, where she currently lives. Having her current exhibit, “Morphologies” be displayed at the Plains Art Museum is “a bit of a homecoming” as she put it. “Morphologies” is a project at least twenty years in the making. Like her other exhibitions, “Morphologies” contains pictures of the contents of libraries, often bound journals and periodicals. Looking through her work, one sees shelves full of volumes of various titles —both well-known and lost in obscurity — in varying physical conditions.

“The analogies I’ve had people make range from the books looking like tombstones to looking ‘heroic’ because they loom so large in the photos,” said Smith. Recently, she added photographs of legal and personal collections, noting the more sterile appearance of library collections to privately owned ones.

“My work is pretty research-based,” said Smith. “A lot of my work has documentary and journalistic influence.” She says observers have often tried to interpret a particular message out of her exhibits, but that is not her intent. “It’s not a grand statement, but an observation of how we’re going from print to digital.”

Even considering this, one can’t help but be struck by Smith’s pieces, including one that exhibits the shredded copies of decades’ worth of National Geographic magazines when the rapidly expanding realm of AI is constantly talked about in the news. Even if there isn’t a “grand statement”, Smith feels that her work is “compounded by urgency” and going to gain importance in the next few decades.

“I’ve been watching titles disappear before my eyes,” Smith said. Smith’s photography allows these volumes that might have otherwise sat molding and collecting dust have another lease on their literary life. Find more information and view Mickey Smith’s work at www.mickeysmith.com.

IF YOU GO:

“Morphologies”

Now-May 25, 2025

Plains Art Museum

704 1st Avenue N., Fargo

https://plainsart.org/exhibitions/mickey-smith-morphologies/

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