The appreciation for Rodney Smith’s body of work has only increased with the passing years. At the time of his first book, published in 1983, Rodney was young and just out of Yale when he took off on a three-month journey around Israel, where he captured the faces of the country. These days Rodney’s work is revered as art, just as it had been revered as sublime illustration when much of it was originally published during the last golden age of magazines. There is something both ageless and completely modern in the crisp symmetry of his photographs. One finds a sanctity and a grace in his pictures and also a faith that binds together all artists: that they know what they’re looking for, even if they haven’t seen it yet. Rodney Smith, on at the Staley-Wise Gallery, chronicles the photographer’s trajectory from a student at Yale to one of the great artists of our time. —Graydon Carter

Graydon Carter is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL