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Tod Smith

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 Tod Smith

Photographer Tod Smith specializes in documenting the people, music, and culture of the U.S. South. His primary inspiration comes from his love of New Orleans, Louisiana, the city of his birth, and its unique culture and music. Smith’s work has been published in Popular Photography Magazine, New Orleans by New Orleans, Shots Magazine, Okra Magazine, Black & White Magazine, and Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans, 1840 & Beyond. His work is currently included in the permanent collection of the New Orleans African American Museum.

Schedule

Noon to 12:45 pm
Bienville Building, Conference Center 173
Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond
Shana Griffin and Tod Smith

1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond

Situating historical inquiry alongside contemporary practices of Black image-making in New Orleans, Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond engages the photographic grammars, textures, multiplicities, and visual sounds of Black life in and outside the city.

Seeing Black features over two hundred images by nearly ninety Black photographers whose work embraces the camera's visual power―discerning, beholding, and documenting people, places, events, collective memories, encounters, and ever-present moments of blackness. From the invisible to the obvious, the mundane to the spectacular, the overlooked to the seen, the erased to the remembered, the artists explore a range of photographic frequencies, styles, and rhythmic scores. Seeing Black invites us to explore historical and contemporary archives of Black life while challenging dominant viewing practices, asking who is taking the picture, who is in or missing from the frame, and how to shift our interactions with the visual image through an intentionally embodied Black gaze.