Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.
[1] In the 1970s he was among the photographers central to the Side Gallery, and created a series of photographs that showed working-class people in the north of England that were in a documentary style but were in fact montages.
[2] Work from the 1980s would show people within townscapes, and in the words of David Alan Mellor, were "atmospheric, steeped in popular (and personal) memory — dark, romantic places with all the melancholy attributed to Eugène Atget's familiar locations".
[2]: 110 Another Country, a joint exhibition with Chris Killip held in London in 1985, was generally well reviewed but to some appeared passé in the light of the new "postmodern" work of Martin Parr and others.
[3] Smith curtailed his career as a photographer in 1990, since when he has been a professional woodworker.