In October 2011, I received an e-mail from the photographer Larry Clark. I knew something of Clark’s relationship with Smith because Clark had written about it briefly in his essay in the anthology Darkroom (Lustrum, 1977). Smith’s printing techniques influenced him and he used two variants of his portrait of Smith to illustrate his essay. But that’s all I knew. Clark and I talked on the phone a few days later, and he told me this story:
I remember I came into town and went up to his loft and just rang the bell and I told him I was, you know, a photographer and I had these pictures that I’d like him to see. He was at the top of the stairs. These stairs went way up and he was standing at the top with his head leaning against the wall, cupping his head in his hand. He said, Oh, I’ve been in the darkroom without any sleep for a week, you know, or something, I’m so tired I can hardly stand up, you know, which is probably true because he used to go into the darkroom for long periods of time and drink scotch and print and listen to music. He said, I just don’t have time. He said, Well, if you leave them, maybe I’ll get a chance to look at them. So I guess I walked up the stairs and put them at his feet, probably, and left. They were all the early Tulsa pictures. I got back to where I was staying a couple of hours later and he had called and left a message. So I called him and he said, Get your ass over here. So I went over. He wanted to know, What the fuck was this? What is this? You know, all these kids shooting drugs. He’d never seen anything like it. So we got to be friends. I went over to see him a few times and we would talk. Kind of the price of admission was I’d bring a bottle of scotch over. We’d drink warm scotch out of paper cups. He was a very good guy, a very good guy.
A few days later, Clark sent me an extraordinary photograph of one of his meetings with Smith inside the loft. He thinks it was taken in 1962 or 1963; he was about nineteen, and he’d just hitchhiked to New York from Milwaukee with the photographer Gernot Newman, who snapped the picture. Clark is dressed in a suit and tie and sits hunched, camera in hand, at Smith’s feet. Smith is reclined in a suggestive position: one arm behind his head and a bulge in his pants. Perhaps the bulge was a coincidence, simply a gathering of loose fabric. In any case, the metaphoric value is appropriate. At this point in Smith’s life—around age forty-four, several years departed from Life, with his list of failed major projects growing—he adored playing the part of master to young aspirants and he sought it for energy. He wasn’t getting the same public affirmation he once had at Life. The legendary maverick had bucked mainstream conventions and prosperity by leaving the corporate magazine, protecting what he called in a letter to Elia Kazan “the Smith standard.” But the standard also required a lot of affection and it often came in the form of pilgrimages to his loft—come to my feet, little novices, and bring me a bottle of scotch.