SMITH

Magnum Square Print: SMITH

Sale launches Monday, March 23, 09:00 a.m. EDT.
Description

Untitled 001. From Spectrographies, 2012. Thermogramme.


In this thermal photograph, a warm palm tenderly caresses a cold hand, lending its energy until their signatures converge at an infrathin threshold, nearly indistinguishable. The image opens Spectrographies (2012), a cycle later extended into an installation and a film, in which SMITH tests what a thermal camera can disclose: a hidden ecology of bonds.


Borrowed from a technology most often associated with military, medical, or surveillance regimes, the device becomes, to the artist, a prosthesis and a companion, its lethal vocation rerouted toward the revelation of the living. Its biometrical gaze renders bodies as gradients and intensities, producing portraits of emission rather than likeness. It gives shape to what eludes ordinary sight yet gives reality its taste: love, lack, ghosts.


Conceived while SMITH was writing a thesis sparked by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, the series reclaims spectrality for the present, where apparitions inhabit the pixels of screens and electronic objects. SMITH asserts that what absence takes is not face, scent or voice, but the tactile effect of presence. These images hold the world not as it is, but as it becomes: transition, metamorphosis, flux, relationship.

© SMITH / The Photographers' Gallery

This print is hand-signed on an archival label to ensure authenticity and preservation, which is affixed to the back of the print.

The edition is available for purchase between:

Monday, March 23, 09:00 a.m. EDT
to Sunday, March 29, 11:59 p.m. EDT
All Magnum Square Prints come with a choice of three framing options: our standard custom wooden frame in black or white, or a new premium walnut frame.

Our premium walnut frames feature plexiglass on both sides, showcasing the signature label via a cutout on the rear. All of these contemporary custom frames are hand-crafted by expert framers.
In partnership with The Photographers' Gallery

Square Print Sale: Odyssey

Magnum Photos partners with The Photographers’ Gallery for the March 2026 Square Print Sale, Odyssey. Odyssey is more than a journey — it is a search for meaning, a crossing of thresholds, a story of growth and resilience. It is the pull of the unknown: the road ahead, the distance behind, the moments that change us along the way.


Spanning continents and decades, Odyssey traces both physical and emotional paths, from epic migrations to quiet reckonings of the self. Moving through borders, memory, and time, the collection reflects the enduring power of photography to bear witness, to connect personal stories with larger histories, and to illuminate the journeys that shape who we are, and what we come to understand.


Over 100 signed or estate-stamped, museum-quality 6x6” prints will be available online for one week, priced from $110/£110/€120.

The Odyssey Square Print Sale runs Monday, March 23 at 9 a.m. ET and ends Sunday, March 29 at 11:59 p.m.

BROWSE THE FULL COLLECTION