The Photography of Mark Steinmetz

Knoxville, TN (Man Sitting on Table), 1991

Steinmetz photographs serendipitous moments of beauty, rarely knowing his subjects of his photos – he sometimes asks them to repeat a gesture he saw them making


You see it written that Mark Steinmetz does not much know the subjects in his photography but you also see the simpatico in this shot.   That's the mark of photographic genius for me since anyone can shoot technical pictures but this kind of immediate relationship with someone he does not even really know tells me Steinmetz was born to be a photographer.

Knoxville, TN (Man in Creek), 1992

‘I don’t begin a project with an agenda,’ he has said. ‘It begins with a faint vision – one of those whispers on a breeze – that somehow gets a grip on me’

Stone Mountain, GA (Couple Laying on Rock), 1994

Steinmetz’s work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Box Galerie in Brussels


Now we see that Southern Man since in English one does not say 'he lays on a rock' but rather we say 'he lies on a rock' and likely no-one in the South will accept that ... they're laying on a rock.  It's part of the Southern dialect just as when they say they are 'fixing food' but you can't fix food ... it's already fuckin' dead or it ain't food.

Note:  Steinmetz really is Southern although he acquired his education in the North at Yale and, unlike with some Yale graduates, you see the skills he learned.


See more examples of the work of Mark Steinmetz on The Guardian:  Georgia on my mind: Mark Steinmetz's American south – in pictures