Smith Galtney is a Maine-based artist and storyteller who uses photography, writing, video, and performance to create narrative-driven pieces that mix autobiography and fiction. He’s currently studying at Image Text Ithaca, an MFA program at Cornell that brings together creative writing, visual media, and book design.
An omnivorous collector of images, Smith shoots with many different cameras, both digitally and on film, and is drawn to the everyday, the mundane moments of beauty and mystery that carry us along. His work also addresses experience, everything we gain and lose with age, the way our pasts continually unfold and reveal themselves, and how the profound changes in gay culture through the last thirty years are both liberating and alienating.
His work was most recently shown in Interior, a group show at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland. His third solo show, Dream Sequence, opened at the Maine Jewish Museum in April 2022. He also curated Inventory, an exhibit featuring works from the Bakery Photo Collective, which opened at SPEEDWELL Contemporary in January 2022.
His photography has also shown at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Cove Street Arts, and the University of Southern Maine, and is part of the permanent collection at the University of New England.
A longtime journalist, Galtney has written for The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, among other publications, as well as NPR and VH1.
A graduate of the International Center of Photography, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and New York University, Galtney has taught classes and workshops at the Maine College of Art, Maine Media Workshops + College, and the Bakery Photo Collective.
Born and raised in New Orleans, a veteran New Yorker, and a relatively recent Maine transplant (fifteen years and counting), Smith is a lifelong music junkie, movie obsessive, and bulldog lover. He lives in Raymond with his husband, John.
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