© Leah King-Smith, Untitled no.11, 1992
I discovered Leah King-Smith’s work through Martyn Jolly’s article Specters from the Archive. Jolly writes about spirit photography in the early stages of the photographic medium and the dead being a continual subject matter for many photographers. Even now, many contemporary photographers revive the dead through their art. Leah King-Smith is one photographer that deals with this exact matter.
King-Smith is an Australian indigenous photographer and her series Patterns of Connections are photo compositions of her own landscape photographs and archival images from the State Library of Victoria. Born from an Aboriginal mother and a white father, she fuels her art from her cultural blend. The original photographs that King-Smith works with, seem to be typical colonialist portraits, the recording of the people. These ghosted figures are given a second breath as she layers the archival images with her own. By putting the people in the foreground and having the landscape run through them, King-Smith seems to revive the aura and connection of the relationship to the land. These ghosts now look on to us as they were once looked on to.
© Leah King-Smith, Untitled no. 5, 1991
© Leah King-Smith, Untitled no. 4, 1991
