In May of this year, artist Luke Smalley passed away unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 53. Aside from a brief obituary written by Alex Hawgood on the blog for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, not a great deal has been written about the life of Luke Smalley and the development of his successful career. The current exhibition of his photographs at ClampArt titled Sunday Drive represent his final body of work.

Born John Luke Smalley into a strict Catholic family of five children, he was always called “John” by relatives, never “Luke” - a name he later chose for himself after leaving home. Growing up in rural Northwestern Pennsylvania, he was the baby of the clan for seven long years, until the birth of his sister in 1962, but according to numerous amusing family stories, John (a.k.a. Luke) never was happy relinquishing his place as the youngest and most loved.

After graduating from high school, Smalley spent time in Southern California before moving to New York City to begin a career in modeling while attending Hunter College. He soon moved on to Boston to attend Northeastern University, and eventually landed back in California where he graduated from Pepperdine University - tellingly, with a degree in sports medicine.

Equiped with a Polaroid camera from the age of 12, he always seemed to be snapping pictures, and after college he continued to be interested in photography and the arts (while earning money from modeling and working as a personal trainer). He soon created a short film based on male swimmers, which he took unannounced to Jack Woody sometime in the early 1980s. Woody’s company, Twin Palms Publishers/Twelvetrees Press, then located in Pasadena, California, had recently printed a monograph for artist Bruce Weber, to which Smalley strongly related and greatly admired. Smalley was a quiet, relaxed individual who was easy to be around, and he and Woody soon struck up a casual friendship. Woody began taking the young artist to various Hollywood parties where he met many celebrities of the day, including Herb Ritts, who would also serve as later inspiration.
It was at this time that Smalley’s idea for Gymnasium was born, which then took the next fifteen years to develop and execute. A series of black-and-white photographs of young, male athletes set in an ambiguous time and place. The images are eventually what kick-started Smalley’s career, and remain to this day his signature work. Woody’s company published the series in book form in 2001, and it was this publication that attracted the attention of commercial agents, and eventually earned Smalley commissions for editorial and fashion work. Soon the photographs from Gymnasium were featured in an exhibition at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art in New York City, and Smalley began earning income from his print sales.
While Smalley spent many years living between Los Angeles and Northwestern Pennsylvania, by 1999 he had shifted to living in New York City while continuing to regularly make the 11 to 12 hour drive home, remaining close to his family and creating the majority of his work.

Around 2002, British menswear designer Kim Jones stumbled across a copy of Gymnasium at the Mercer Hotel. He fell in love with the work and hired Smalley to shoot images of his designs. Their collaboration culminated in Smalley’s second book of black-and white and color photographs, Kim Jones, now a rare and valuable collectible.

Smalley’s next photographic series, Exercise at Home, for the first time consists entirely of color images and revisits themes of adolescent growing pains acted out under the guise of earnest athleticism. Again, buff teenagers perform for the camera, this time competing in simple but strange contests meant to establish their standing within the group. As with Gymnasium, Smalley painstakingly coordinated the creation of the work to the extent of constructing his own athletic equipment, props, and costumes. Twin Palms published the work in 2007, and exhibitions coincided at galleries in New York City and Los Angeles. It was Smalley’s plan to continue publishing artist books in small editions every couple of years, which would then be coordinated with the exhibition of the prints, thus supplementing his ongoing commercial career.
Smalley's final series, Sunday Drive, was conceived as a humorous and provocative narrative, which would finally incorporate women into his oeuvre. It tells the story of three nubile young women who inexplicably primp and preen while frequently slipping into dramatic moments of exaggerated ennui. The bedecked threesome eventually piles into a butter-colored 1966 Chevy convertible, and it soon becomes clear that they are en route to the state penitentiary to visit their respective boyfriends (incarcerated for crimes unknown). The second half of the story involves tattooed young men killing time in the slammer waiting for their sweethearts to arrive, and seeming unusually distracted by one another. Consistent with his two earlier series, the imagery of Sunday Drive constructs a world of a timeless era in which the artist lightheartedly toys with issues of sensuality and machismo.

After completing the series, largely shot in an out-of-commission wing of a prison in Maryland, Smalley finalized the photographs and set in motion the plans for an exhibition at ClampArt, in New York City, to be accompanied by his fourth book, Sunday Drive, again published by Twin Palms. Sadly, he never lived to see the success of his final project unveiled in the fall of 2009.

All images: ©Smalley Partnership, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City
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