Life's Work of Photographer Chronicles Central District's Rich History in MOHAI Exhibit

bySusan Fried (words and photos)

On November 18 an exhibit of the extraordinary work of Seattle Photographer Al Smith opened at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI). The show called Seattle on the Spot: The photographs of Al Smith features pictures of Seattle's Central District.

Smith documented Seattle's vibrant African American community from the late 1930s through 2005. He brought his camera everywhere, taking pictures of his family and friends, social gatherings and community events.

The exhibit is directed by MOHAI's Curator of Photography Howard Giske, a long-time friend of Smith. The two first met when Smith volunteered to work in the darkroom at the old MOHAI location near the Montlake Bridge in1986. Giske soon learned Smith had an amazing collection of historical images of Seattle's black community.

"We discovered a month or three later after he started working here that he was also a photographer," Giske said. "He brought in some of his photographs he had taken early in the history of Seattle – 1930s, 40s and later and he knocked us out. His pictures were just wonderful. We immediately gave him a small exhibit just outside the library and darkroom where he was working and followed that up a few years later with a bigger show."

Seattle writer and author Paul de Barros, worked on the Jazz on the Spot exhibit in 1993 and also contributed to the current exhibit as an advisor for material related to Seattle's Jazz scene. The writer said one of his favorite images in the exhibit is a photograph of the Leon Vaughn Band at the Basin Street Night Club in 1948.

"I love this photograph. I actually have a print of it in my home because I bought it from Al years ago. It's a photograph, to me that really epitomizes Al's eye for the moment and for composition." de Barros described how the viewer's eyes are drawn to the singer, and then to the saxophonist and then to the piano player, all of whom are laughing. The viewer's eyes scan the image almost hearing the music and laughter.

The present exhibit is a collaborative effort with numerous volunteers and organizations contributing time and money to what Giske described as "an amazing and fairly complete retrospective of [Smith's] life's work. There are at least 40,000 pictures we had to choose from, it was impossible to narrow that down. You'll get a chance to see an exhibit that very few people have seen, we're really proud of it and I know if Al was still here he would also be proud."

The curators of the show hope visitors to the exhibit might see someone in the photographs they recognize to help the museum identify people in the images. During the creation of the exhibit, MOHAI would bring photographs to the ROOTS Picnic, an annual summer picnic begun in the 70s to bring together some of the earliest Seattle black families for an annual reunion. The meeting of Relatives of Old TimersofSeattle, or ROOTS for short, was an opportunity for the Museum to meet people who knew Smith and might know some of the people in the photographs. Smith was a frequent attendee at the picnic, which he photographed of course.

The exhibit will be open through June 17, 2018. There will be additional programming in relation to it with the Curators on December 5 at MOHAI and Portrait of the City: The 25 Most Important Photographs from Seattle History at Hotel Theodore on December 12.

For more information visitmohai.org.