Mickey Smith (born 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.) is an American photographer, conceptual artist, and jewellery designer working in Auckland, New Zealand.
She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art, CEC ArtsLink, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
In her series, Volume (2006-2010), Smith photographed library-stack sets of bound periodicals to memorialize them as shared objects of a common literary culture, now passed.
In these contemporary images, books have become vacant props, drafted into private battles and culture wars out of a desperate nostalgia for the fading power of the written word.
The stark, dark photographs in this new exhibition test the limits of objectivity and the false consolation of casualness even as, in the tradition of documentary and crime-scene photography, the images aspire to conscientious neutrality.