The Weather And a Place to Live ― Photographs of the Suburban West

In compelling, often stunning black-and-white photographs, The Weather and a Place to Live portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States - the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. Steven B. Smith's large-format photographs, which he has been making since the early 1990s in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado, take us into the reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory. Based on this body of work, he was chosen as winner of the biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.
The power of these photographs lies in part in Smith's unusual knowledge of the places he portrays. Raised in Utah, Smith has worked on construction crews, and he was a contractor in California.
These altered landscapes force us to consider the consequences of human design battling natural forces across great expanses, a fragile balancing act and a contorted equation in which nature becomes both inspiration and adversary. Steven B. Smith's elegant photographs of this constructed universe confront us with the beauty of images as images, yet push us to reflect on the devastation possible in the simple act of choosing a place to live.

Steven B. Smith is Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.