Up Close with Lee Smith

“My camera was an extension of my hand: wherever I went, it went,” says Lee S. Smith ’69, the managing editor of his class’s Harvard Yearbook.

Though he sidelined his photography after college as he pursued a career in law, Smith kept thousands of photo negatives and contact prints in two big metal boxes in his home — his collection a black and white impression of seemingly every social event, political activity, and academic function on campus throughout the ’60s.

Smith was ubiquitous, and so was his camera.

Last spring, Smith decided to let go of the photos and donate them to the Harvard University Archives. The scenes they captured, though, were etched into the archives of his memory.

“You’re sitting there, part of you wants to put your camera down and also join in making the speech,” Smith recalls of the 1967 Dow Chemical Corporation sit-in. “But the other part of you knows that you change what’s going on when you become a participant. If you’re there to observe and to document fairly, you really can’t play both roles.”

His role, he discovered, lay in the darkroom of the yearbook building.

Smith’s enduring attachment to his time is representative of his broader artistic philosophy, one of introspection and intimacy. Part of that philosophy emerged from an encounter with the groundbreaking photojournalist Gordon Parks during his visit to the yearbook staff.

“When you want to take a picture of somebody, you don’t want to just put on a telephoto lens and hide behind the telephoto,” Smith shares of the artist’s advice. “He said you should always crop your pictures with your feet.”

Smith clarifies: “You have to be invisible, but you become invisible by engaging.”

Those words would take Smith into rooms with some of the most renowned Black political and artistic leaders of his time — from Whitney Young, Jr. and Bayard Rustin to Dionne Warwick and The Temptations. Smith and his camera captured the 1967 Harvard Press Workers Employee Union Protest; marches in support of the creation of the new Afro-American Studies program; draft resistance protests; and the spring 1969 protest of the Graduate School of Design course on “Riot Control.”

In a time of political turbulence, Smith chose to divorce himself from his own feelings in an attempt to capture history authentically — “to make a difference” with his camera.

Though never the subject of his own photos, Smith captures the Black experience through his unique lens as a photographer — an identity that granted him both acceptance and trust as one of the few dozen Black students on campus.

“You have to spend time with people. You have to get them to accept you in some role,” Smith says. “In my case, it’s as a photographer.”

Even though he has entered a “second life” as a digital photographer he has retained Parks’s advice to get up close. Smith recalls walking through the streets and marketplaces of Antigua, Guatemala in 2007.

“I just go and sit with them. I don’t speak Mayan, Kaqchikel, but there’s so much communication that happens nonverbally,” Smith says. “Sometimes words get in the way. I think people know a lot just by looking in your eyes.”

To Smith, his photography is an act of service.

He points to a shot of the “soulful face” of Gabriella, a young Mayan girl he met in Antigua, with her mother Ruth. Captivated by her eyes, Smith didn’t realize she had an ear deformity.

Instead, Smith focuses on the moment he returned to the same park he first saw Gabriella in to give her mother the photo: “I’m giving her her daughter in my art.”

As our conversation comes to a close, he describes a “Do a Good Turn Daily” Boy Scout coin he used to hide in his pocket, quietly alternating it from one pocket to the other every time he did a good deed. Smith shares that the lesson he took from the coin was to not look for recognition or rewards for acts of service, but rather to find “places where things have meaning.”

“People always want me to tell them what the picture is about,” Smith says. “I try to resist that because I want them to find their own story. To get into the picture and find their own joy. Because that’s my joy.”

— Associate Magazine Editor Ciana J. King can be reached at ciana.king@thecrimson.com.