PechaKeucha Auckland presents The Real #64. We spend our days and nights in a world of concepts, intermediated by screens. Our communications bubble across the ether in 120 characters, and every image is a question more than an answer. We don't know what is true, but we need truth as a foundation to create from. So how do we keep our connection to The Real? Racing against the clock, nine creatives share their work in 20 images x 20 seconds, and how they keep it real.

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Artist Mickey Smith discusses her artistic practice and exhibition "ARCHITETTURA", on view at CLAMP in New York City. In the images Smith does not alter reality through lighting or manipulation. The artist leaves the books as they are found and photographs them as they were seen in the library. The majority of bound periodicals and journals photographed over that time have since been deaccessioned, so Smith’s images now represent the sole record of their existence.

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In episode 216 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on photographs as memories of lives lived and lost, and reducing the pressure on making work. Plus this week photographer Mickey Smith takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’

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With her striking photographic work, artist Mickey Smith reflects the times we live in. For around two decades, her focus has been on finding and documenting bound periodicals and journals in public libraries, whereby the well-chosen titles speak to the viewer from the frame, provoking contemplation often with a single word.

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Our Pull Focus video series takes its lead from our print magazine feature of the same name. Here, we focus in on what makes a particular artwork WORK as a work of art. Watch artist Mickey Smith in conversation with Maddy Matheson about her work LIFE (Redux), part of her forthcoming exhibition New Outlook at Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland.

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Obscura Journal Contributor Danielle Ezzo recently interviewed artist Mickey Smith in preparation for the first ever Foundry Commission drop, where five artists were awarded the opportunity to envision and work on a new project of their choosing. The first generation of artists received mentorship and curatorial assistance throughout the process. Smith discusses TIME & AGAIN, a series of twenty five images created for the commission and her experience with archives, libraries, and the unique relationship they share with grief.

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In PhotoVerso #7 we interview Photographer of the Week, Mickey Smith, a New Zealand-based conceptual photographer and a familiar face within the NFT photo world. RawDAO’s most recent acquisition includes two triptychs from her series, Library of Obsolescence.

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In Matters of Time, Mickey Smith presents a group of immaculate archival prints from digital photographs, depicting the spines of bound periodical volumes found in libraries, both In New Zealand and overseas. Review by Andrew Clark.

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Reading Room is a series of live interviews with inspiring makers of things; Architects, Photographers, Writers and Painters. Simon Devitt interviews Mickey Smith about her personal library to reveal stories and insights into the artist’s life and works.

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For more than 15 years, photographer Mickey Smith has prowled through libraries around the world in search of bound periodicals - like popular contemporary magazines - to snap the book spines. The result is striking in its own right. But it's also about documenting something that's on its way out, with the advent of digitisation. Lynn Freeman talks with Mickey Smith.

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Mickey has called New Zealand home for nearly a decade and I think you will agree that we are the lucky ones. In talking with Mickey in preparation for her takeover we talked about the length of time that the focus of her practice has been on libraries, books and archives - some 20 years - and how over that time the whole landscape of her long-standing enquiry has changed from the purely analogue to the digital with the advent of digitisation of archives, books and photography - how what started as a fascination for her subject matter has evolved into an important document of a passage of time that had seen the place of the library and the book in our society under threat.

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Fast forward a century and more, and when US conceptual artist and photographer Mickey Smith moved from New York to Auckland she was intrigued to discover that what seemed like an American institution had established to 18 Carnegie libraries around New Zealand, four in Australia and one in Fiji, between 1902 and 1916. Review by Mary Macpherson.

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Even for successful Visual Artists their income from art alone is sometimes not sufficient to live properly. Combining their artistic work with experience in arts management can help making a living. But, as the example of Mickey Smith shows, even that doesn't always help against unpredictable changes in life.

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Only a handful of them remain, but over a hundred years ago New Zealand was home to 18 of two and a half thousand libraries around the world, established by American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The buildings were largely responsible for this country's free library lending system. Lynn Freeman talks to her about As You Will: Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific which is published by Te Tuhi.

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Mickey Smith is an American artist that has been living in New Zealand since 2011. Living amongst the Kiwis is as complex as its diverse landscape. Mickey describes the ups and downs of living in such a distant country.

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That Must Be Really Interesting is the first in a series of short documentaries about people with fascinating jobs. This episode, The Artist, follows photographer Mickey Smith through the process of a book signing at MoMA PS1, installation at Invisible-Exports, and her Denudation exhibition opening in New York City in October 2012.

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The palace of memory is re-built again with each walk through. In her new series, Denudation, Mickey Smith presents a mesmerizing kind of in-situ laboratory-style photography—the image as evidentiary document, the print as cold case.

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The subject of these dark, somewhat brooding photos is an abandoned library emptied of its contents. Details of barren shelves, a rickety old library ladder and a forlorn piece of bookbinding left on the floor hint at some sort of narrative, but the point of the images seems to be precisely the opposite: that the who, what, when, where and how of this situation can never be divined.

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We have a fat binder of fading newspaper articles and magazines in the studio. (The irony is not lost.) After something specific? Get in touch, we’ll teach an intern how to use a fax machine and send you a copy.

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