Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, editor, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice examines the archetypal foundations of the creative impulse and she uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Rupersburg, and Charles Garabedian. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor working alongside some the greats of fashion photography, Smithson returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice.
She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Smithsonian Art and Space Museum, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, In addition, her work is held in public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Harper’s, Eyemazing, Medium Format Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.
Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. She has been an educator at the Los Angeles Center of Photography since 200. Her teaching spans the globe. In 2012, Smithson received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2022, the Lucie Foundation nominated her for Photo Educator of the Year. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50.
In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to a series of portraits for the Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In 2018 and in 2019, her work was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2019, Kris Graves Projects commissioned her to create the book LOST II: Los Angeles that is now sold out. Peanut Press Publishing released her monograph, Fugue State in Fall of 2021, also sold out. Her books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. In 2022, Smithson was honored as a Hassleblad Heroine. With the exception of her cell phone, she only shoots film.
