Saori on Sea Plane Wing, Dominican Republic, 2010
At first glance, Rodney Smith’s photograph of a woman standing at the very edge of a seaplane wing looks impossible.
The immaculate dress. The still water. The tiny figure balanced high above it. Everything is so perfectly placed that the obvious assumption is that the photograph must have been constructed afterwards.
It wasn’t.
The woman is model Saori Yamamoto. She was really standing there, on the very tip of the wing of a seaplane in the Dominican Republic in 2010.
For Rodney Smith, that distinction mattered enormously.
She really was standing there
A couple of years after making the photograph, Rodney became aware that people were questioning whether his images had been digitally manipulated.
He addressed this particular photograph directly.
“Let me assure anyone that doubts its validity, she was there standing on the very tip of that wing.”
For many photographers, that might simply have been a clarification about technique.
For Rodney, it opened up a much larger question.
What is a photograph?
And how much of its magic should happen when the shutter is pressed, rather than afterwards?
Rodney had built a career creating photographs that often seemed to belong somewhere between reality and a dream. Men floating above landscapes. Women balanced in improbable places. Figures disappearing into architecture. People interacting with hats, umbrellas, aeroplanes and trees in ways that feel almost surreal.
Yet the strange thing about Rodney Smith’s world is that much of it was very real.
He worked with film, location, composition and available light. Instead of building impossible worlds digitally, he tried to find ways of making the real world briefly become impossible.
The magic happened in front of the camera
Rodney was not interested in photography becoming illustration.
He loved the fact that a photograph was connected to a particular place and a particular moment.
As he wrote:
“Photography is a joyful affirmation of the world as it is given to us at the given moment.”
That sentence explains a great deal about his work.
His photographs may be meticulously composed, but they rarely feel rigid. There is humour in them. Chance. Movement. Sometimes even a little danger.
The perfection is not created afterwards.
It comes from waiting until all the pieces briefly fall into place.
The right location.
The right light.
The right person.
And then, finally, the right moment.
Reality, made slightly unbelievable
Smith’s photographs have often been compared with the paintings of René Magritte, and the connection is easy to understand.
Both create worlds that look familiar until something is slightly wrong.
A man is somewhere a man should not be.
The scale feels strange.
A perfectly dressed figure appears in a landscape where no perfectly dressed figure ought to be.
And yet Rodney’s approach was fundamentally photographic.
He once explained that he would first find the location. Everything else followed from there.
That process is important when looking at Saori on Sea Plane Wing.
The aeroplane was not inserted later.
Neither was Saori.
The landscape existed.
The light existed.
The extraordinary balance of all those elements existed, if only for a brief moment.
Rodney simply recognised it.
Why the photograph still makes us look twice
There is something wonderfully contradictory about the image.
Saori appears completely composed, while her position is anything but.
The photograph feels peaceful, yet there is an obvious sense of risk.
It looks meticulously controlled and slightly absurd at the same time.
That combination was one of Rodney Smith’s great strengths.
His work can be elegant without being serious, surreal without becoming artificial and beautifully composed without losing its sense of play.
And perhaps that is why his photographs still make people stop.
You look once because the image is beautiful.
Then you look again because something does not quite make sense.
And when you learn that the scene really happened, it becomes even better.
A world that really existed
Rodney Smith died in 2016, but his photographs have continued to reach an increasingly international audience. His work is held in major museum collections and continues to be exhibited around the world.
Perhaps part of their appeal today is precisely that they belong to a different way of making photographs.
At a time when almost any image can be created, altered or generated, Rodney’s pictures remind us how extraordinary reality can be when someone knows how to look at it.
He did not need to invent Saori standing on the wing of a seaplane.
He simply needed to put her there.
And be ready with his camera.
