Geraint Smith is from a town in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales, a coal-mining community where his mother reared four children and his father worked at the mine. As a child, he and his family would go to the local cinema to watch Western films, which he describes as being filled with “endless skies and expansive locations. . . . Looking back today, I can’t help thinking I unconsciously knew I would live in the wide-open spaces of the American Southwest.” At age three, he began to carry the family Kodak Brownie camera, and his father occasionally allowed him to take a picture. Smith identifies this as his earliest interest in photography. After moving to Los Angeles at 22, Smith made photography his medium of expression, embarking on a career as a freelance photographer. Ten years later, Smith moved to Taos. “What I discovered living in the Southwest . . . is just how much room there is in me to remember and rediscover the peace at the center of my soul.”

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