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Leonard Russell
It was a happy day for me, personally and professionally, when thirty years or so ago I came across Edwin Smith. Today we know Edwin as a great architectural photographer, but in those days he seemed to specialise in what a later generation came to call pop art subjects - things seen in shop windows, woebegone plaster lions in Alexandra Park and so on. The full range and potential of his work only became evident to me when with Olive Cook he began to devise delightful features for "The Saturday Book". Both prodigies, they were an editor's dream. They did everything them selves, layout included: you just sent the words to the printers and the pictures to the blockmakers.
There were so many things to admire about Edwin. For my part I marvelled at the way his strong and impeccable aesthetic sense lived with his rare practicality. He knew how things worked. He was a trained architect. He combined "All the Phototricks" (a book of his still in print after more than thirty years) with an artist's view of life. Like his wife, Olive, he disdained self-advertisement and was forever gentle, humane, and infinitely helpful to everyone. By the time he died he had achieved renown, and some affluence, as a photographer, yet one sensed that he longed to be accepted as a painter. It is not for me, who believes that painting ended with Renoir, to venture an opinion about Edwin or any other contemporary artist. All I know is that in everything he did he looked at things with the eye and the joy of the authentic artist.
From the catalogue produced
to accompany the exhibition
'Aspects of the Art of Edwin Smith' at The
Minories,
Colchester in 1974.
Leonard Russell was the first editor of 'The Saturday Book' series
