Erwin E. Smith

Erwin Evans Smith (August 22, 1886 – September 4, 1947) was an American photographer who used the medium to document the waning years of open-range cowboy life in the American West. During his lifetime, he was recognized as having "brought together with the camera the most complete account of the passing west that has ever been made."

Early life Smith was born in Honey Grove, Texas, to Albert Alexander Smith and Nancy Erwin Smith White. Smith's father died of pneumonia when the boy was not yet four years old, and when his mother remarried in 1894, she relocated the family to Bonham, Texas, where Smith would spend his childhood years. As a teenager, Smith realized that the cowboys who worked the open range were, like the frontier itself, receding into the past. But from his experience as an apprentice cowhand during these years, and by 1911 he had turned his full artistic attention onto photography and returned to Texas to practice in that medium exclusively. His goal was "to do with his photography what Charles M. Russell did with his painting: to maintain a sense of documentary realism by being truthful to the world with work created in an artistically pleasing way." "He wanted to illustrate the entire cowboy culture," an article in 2008 asserted, "to clarify all the varied responsibilities and define the characteristic techniques of managing cattle, as well as to showcase the unique talents of the legendary men and horses."

Soon after Smith had begun his studies in Boston in 1907, he discovered the Pinkham & Smith Company, which sold cameras and photographic goods. Within a few weeks, company representatives there had become acquainted with Smith's work and arranged an exhibition of forty of his prints in their street-display windows on Boylston Street. As both a cowhand and photographer, he rode with some of the largest outfits in the West, ranches like the Shoe Box, JA, Frying Pan, Matador, and LS, which with their vast sizes still approximated what the open range had been like.

Death and legacy In July 1947 Smith was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which claimed his life two months later at the age of sixty-one. The photographer's will named his sister, Mary Alice Pettis (1906–1986), as beneficiary and executor of his estate. In 1949, Pettis deposited 1,800 of the photographer's negatives with the Library of Congress but retained several hundred images related to home and family. Upon her death, Pettis bequeathed Smith's entire body of work, including the inventory on loan to the Library of Congress, to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. The collection comprises over 2,000 negatives and more than 700 vintage prints, as well as Smith's personal papers and library. Today, Smith is counted among the most important photographers of cowboy life and the finest of his kind to have worked in Texas.