PHOTOGRAPHY

William Tyler Smith woke up one morning in Madrid, Spain and decided that he wanted to become a still photographer.  Perhaps it was the city's architecture or lifestyle or energy.  Perhaps it was the smell of a cafe con leche or tortilla de patatas. He wasn't sure but he knew it didn't matter and that he was probably "over-thinking". So he walked into the largest department store in Spain, El Cortes Ingles, and purchased a point-and-shoot 35mm photo camera.  His life would never be the same again. A self-taught photographer, Smith would walk around Madrid for days re-experiencing the world the way it looked through optical lenses.  He realized quickly that the "real" world, the way we see things, and the "optical lens" world see things quite differently.  This realization excited Smith as he immediately understood the creative possibilities and potential. 

He has been photographing moments that he finds interesting and compelling ever since those fond days in Madrid.  It’s difficult to describe Smith’s style as a photographer but for many the words humanist, subtextual, compassionate and intuitive come to mind.  He was once called "pretentious" but that doesn't often happen.

In 1989, Smith found himself in Berlin, one week after the wall had officially fallen down.  So, he went to a department store where he bought some white spray paint and a hammer and chisel.  He spray painted his name and some friend's names on the wall, and then took photographs.  One of the coolest gifts he'd ever given.  He then proceeded to chisel and chip away about thirty pounds of the Berlin Wall which he faithfully lugged across Europe for another month in his back pack. Smith, in effect, helped tear down the Berlin Wall.  He is proud to have been a part of world history, and you should feel grateful that he has too. 

When Smith was a graduate film student at The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), he did photographic essays on the downtown homeless community on Skid Row, the 1992 Rodney King trial verdict riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

Smith was hired by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation to document one of their missions to Poland, Russia and Israel.   Places he visited and photographed were Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Jaifa, Netanya and Jerusalem.

Smith’s photographs for The Los Angeles Jewish Federation were used in their 1998 Who Knew? campaign, which featured billboards all over the Los Angeles metropolitan area.  The fund-raising video, which used all of Smith's photographs, helped the Federation raise millions of dollars that year. 

Some of the photographs he took on September 11, 2001, appeared in the book, The September 11th Photo Project. 

The challenge of telling a story or evoking an emotion with just one still image has always been fascinating to Smith.  Raised by a father who was a cinema and music buff,  and a mother who was an artist, Smith grew up around images, rhythm and visual storytelling his entire childhood.  Images just seemed a natural and comfortable way for Smith to communicate. 

He generally prefers a photo-journalistic/documentary approach to shooting as he wishes to capture each person or place’s emotional truth at the specific moment he takes the photograph.  He rarely takes traditional portraits but isn’t adverse to doing so if the chemistry is right.

"The excitement and thrill of having to capture moments, stories, and emotions in real time, reacting to what you see, and never knowing what you will capture is the challenge and the fuel," says Smith. “There’s a million and one parallel stories going on at the same time and it’s our job to see and capture them for inspiration, truth and posterity.”

In 2017, after  months of crying, whining and mourning, Smith finally switched from film to digital, and the world did not end. He was hired to teach film directing in Mumbai, India, at the New York Film Academy for four months.  He knew that it was time to switch as he would no doubt take thousands upon thousands of images.  He started calculating the costs of film and developing and contact sheets and so on, and .... he purchased a used Canon 5D Mark III and off he went to teach film directing in Bollywood.  Good thing cause he did in fact take about ten thousand photographs.  Smith was surprised at how much he enjoyed shooting digitally, particularly the immediate image feedback and the ability to show his subjects the photographs.