The Art of Napping Curator Anne Morin asks, why did Rodney Smith take so many naps?
In the thick heat of summer, a nap doesn’t have to feel like surrender. It can be a purposeful pause — an invitation to slip into that soft space where dreams guide us towards our most inspired ideas.
I was very impressed by the fact that Rodney used to have several short naps during the day.
From the outside, it looked like rest. But inside, he was creating – envisioning his next photograph, finding clarity in the stillness. His naps were a passage into a place no one else could reach, a secret room at the very center of himself, where images emerged between worlds and realities crossed.
Smith could nap almost anywhere. On a daily basis he’d follow the movement of light around his house, a morning nap in the east sunroom, an afternoon nap in his library, a late afternoon siesta outside his bedroom before retiring for the night. He’d be just as quick to take a nap while driving to scout locations or in the middle of a large shoot with hundreds of crew, models and extras on-set. Smith would just close his eyes and disappear.
His dreams opened a portal between worlds. Each picture is an invitation to cross the mirror. This is the other side of consciousness — that realm where his characters seem to transcend their physical nature, escaping both gravity and their human condition. In this alternate reality, this dreamlike state, the laws of weightlessness bend to Smith’s will.
The images exist in that strange realm where something seems impossible yet feels utterly real at the same time. The distance between both worlds is really, really narrow. The people become part of the landscape, absorbed into the design language, pasted onto architecture like elements in a dream. His images erase rather than reveal, retract rather than add, offering us only what is elemental, delivering no concrete information about place, time, or circumstance.
Maybe that’s what those naps were for — to access that place where logic dissolves and fragments float free, where the unconscious mind that so worried him could finally create without explanation, without the burden of making sense. In sleep, Rodney found his way to that other side of consciousness. And in his photographs, he brings us there too.
It’s exactly what James Joyce says in Ulysses: “Close your eyes and see.” Everything is behind the curtain. Let me bring you there. Give me your hand and I’ll bring you to another world.
Anne Morin curates and tours international exhibitions of photography. In 2022, Anne received the Photo Curator of the Year award at the Lucie Awards (Carnegie Hall, NY) for her work on the Vivian Maier exhibition, Unseen, at the Musée du Luxembourg.
