Steven B. Smith: Your Mountain Is Waiting

by Steven B. Smith (Photographer)

The work of photographer and Rhode Island School of Design professor Steven B. Smith (born 1963) chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate, wrote of his work, "Smith’s images record not so much a contrast as two violent absences joining as a single force. Landfill, seedling, turnabout, heating coil collude with the sky and mountains in a triumph of scale not so much confused or lost as irrelevant."

Steven B. Your Mountain Is Waiting documents the accelerating suburbanization of Smith’s native Utah. Peeling back the layers of westward expansion with equal parts subtlety and irony, Smith captures the new McMansions springing up against the rocky, rust-red mountains and deep blue skies of the West. Smith is equally attentive to the cast of characters that fill these new landscapes―the people that build them, and the people that live in them.

172 pages, Hardcover

Published January 28, 2020

About the author

Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Master of Branford College at Yale. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. At Yale he has served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science, Director of the Undergraduate Program in Humanities, and Acting Chair of Judaic Studies. His research has been focused on the history of political philosophy and the role of statecraft in constitutional government. His recent publications include Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity, Spinoza's Book of Life, and Reading Leo Strauss.