The visual artist can empower.
David Smothers is a photographer who lives and works in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. He is a photographer because as Susan Sontag said, the camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It disconnects and freezes reality in order to assist the viewer in interpreting the photographic image; which is his personal essay on that exact moment in time.
He is inspired by the visual artists Shirin Neshat, Steve McCurry, Ken Stockton, Bruce Gilden, Anselm Kiefer, Grant Brittain, and Jimmy Chin. He is also inspired by the writer Joseph Campbell because he’s a storyteller that finds the connective tissues of common cultural and human themes. He seeks to fill that deep empty place with something meaningful by helping one to go inside to examine the void they hold onto so dearly.
Smothers feels the visual artist can empower. Smothers’ art-making process consists of reaching out and recording an image then representing it for others to experience and become curious, then empowering something that can’t empower itself. To create. To make impactful. To force you to notice, even for a brief moment. He represents the exact intersection between the courage of curiosity and the fear of confrontation. He is connected to the contemporary critical dialog of his medium through the ideas of the theorist Susan Sontag. Fantasy and reality can be connected through a small, less than one second, time capsule of the lens. This helps to reinforce the character of mystery of that specific moment in time.