You're Not from Around Here: Photographs of East Tennessee. Photographs by Mike Smith. Introduction by Robert Sobieszek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 120 pages, 92 color plates. $45.00.

Mike Smith has been making photographs in rural east Tennessee since arriving there in 1981 to teach at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City. At first, he was treated as a stranger to the area. Over the years, though, he has made himself familiar with the region's people and their places by driving its complicated network of back roads, often until finding himself lost. He now claims to know he's in good picture-making territory when he catches the distinctive odor of hunting dogs in cages, and he's made some very good photographs of those dogs. His image-making has gone well beyond east Tennessee's canine population, however. You're Not from Around Here includes pictures of rural people, the spaces they've created for themselves to live in, and the land they live on.

In a brief preface, Smith tells us that he has "little interest in documenting or recording anything," preferring instead the purely visual pleasure of "seeing light on surfaces." He views his color photographs as little more than "dye on paper" and says they are primarily about themselves as end-product--what he calls "the visual resolve of each picture." It is this final version of each image--the print itself, as art object--that he considers the "most compelling" element of his work, or so he claims.

I don't want to believe him about this. It sounds too much like Garry Winogrand's famous pronouncement that he photographed in order to find out what things looked like when photographed and seems every bit as disingenuous, especially when coming from a photographer like Mike Smith, whose best pictures--and many of them are very good--depend so heavily on content for the eventual form and impact of their "final resolve." The book's title, of course, refers to Smith's identity as someone from "away," an outsider persona he has put to good use over the years in photographing a cultural and social landscape that once was new to him. If his pictures were only "light on surfaces" or "dye on paper," it wouldn't matter where Smith was from, where his photographs were made, or how long he'd been making them. All of those things do matter in You're Not from Around Here.

The book's photographic content falls roughly into three categories: images of people (almost all of them portraits); pictures of spaces people live in or near (houses, mobile homes, interiors, sheds, barnyards, dog pens); and more distantly seen photographs of a hilly, partially wooded rural landscape indelibly marked by longtime human presence. Smith's portraits seem the weakest of the three groups (which is good, because it's by far the smallest). With few exceptions, the older people he photographs look dazed and uncertain; the younger people--children and teens for the most part--seem more aware of themselves but not any more attentive to their surroundings. Both old and young appear victimized by their lives and environments.

Happily, there are only 15 pictures of people in the book, and the remaining 77 images--divided more or less equally between the other two categories--are much more rewarding. Those of people's living spaces are especially good. One photograph shows several delicately sketched pencil drawings of animals--dogs, raccoons, turkeys, deer--by a talented schoolboy named David (his name is on two of the drawings in timid grade-school cursive) taped onto a refrigerator with oversized, crudely torn off lengths of duct tape. Another, taken from a porch, divides into layers from front to back: a gracefully shaped porch post in the extreme foreground; a patch of bright orange tiger lilies, a yard of wildly overgrown grass, and a deteriorating brick shed in the middle distance; and a dilapidated child's swing set in front of a line of leafy green trees in the background. The overall effect is of someone's dream-life suddenly interrupted, then rendered immobile and allowed to fade. There are many other images of human living spaces that are equally poignant, equally beautiful.

Smith's east Tennessee landscapes are also good, if sometimes a bit understated. In one way or another, the best of them show the effects of generations' worth of human interaction with the land. An overgrown marshy area sprouts a series of telephone poles and wires, a satellite dish, and a tiny distant barn; a green hillside recedes in terraces formed by countless cattle traversing it over the years; a newly turned garden plot shows the delicate tracery of morning frost along the tops of its furrows. Smith prefers photographing on overcast days, which makes his pictures' colors as subtle as their content. Occasionally, this becomes a problem. There's a fine line between subtle and just plain dull, and a few of Smith's photographs cross that line. But that's a pretty minor complaint about a rich and rewarding body of work. You're Not from Around Here is well worth looking at and thinking about.

David Wharton