Steven B. Smith: Your Mountain Is Waiting

The photographs in Your Mountain Is Waiting document the accelerating suburbanization of STEVEN B. 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. An essay by Lydia Millet contextualizes Smith’s photos within a narrative of an American empire in decline.

Steven B. Smith is a photographer whose work chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. For this work he was awarded the First Book Prize for Photography by the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West was published by Duke University Press (2005). His most recent book Your Mountain Is Waiting was published by Radius Books (2020),  He has received many awards, including Guggenheim and Kittredge Fellowships. His work has been widely exhibited and can be found in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Smith received his BFA from Utah State University and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He lives in Riverside, RI and teaches in the Photography department at RISD.