When you move away, you see the place you’re leaving, not the place you’re going to. You look at what you will have left behind, the shell of you, the shadow. It is the photograph’s negative.

Mickey Smith’s Denudation images have a haunted quality. They are somber, depicting empty shelves and a closet, a ladder to nowhere, tied off airless garbage bags, and discarded book spines. The Wil to Win is reconsidered.

Ms. Smith’s earlier Volume and Collocations—ebullient portraits of books, individually or in groups and on shelves—were bold and graphic. What made those pictures so effective was subtext, here made explicit—a deeper, darker unseen melancholy or despair.

It is not that these works have a sense of doom or resignation to them. They act like harbingers of some transcendence. An unseen protagonist has moved on and left this behind. Prospero throws down his book and his magic, and leaves the island. Here he has literally just taken it off the shelf, and departed. The flaying or erosion of layers of life, the denudation, yield opportunity and newness.

“To regret deeply is to live afresh,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1839. Ms. Smith captures the plaintive and enigmatic and offers it as possibility. 

– Prospero’s Shelf by W.M. Hunt, 2012