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C. Rose Smith is a photographer and Assistant Curator of Photography at the Memphis Art Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. In their curatorial role, Smith is stewarding the Hooks Brothers Photography Studio Collection and making it accessible to the public through exhibitions, publications, and digitization. The archive, comprising over 100,000 photographic objects from 1890 to 1984, documents the Hooks Brothers’ foundational role in shaping visual culture in Memphis and the broader Mid-South.
As both an image-maker and curator, their research investigates the intersections of cotton, Black labor, and self-making through portraiture in the U.S. South, with particular attention to 19th- and early 20th-century commercial photography studios. Considering Memphis, a former major port for the export of cotton, cultivated, processed, and transported through Black labor, Smith examines how photography operated as a medium for formerly enslaved people and their descendants to construct self-authored images and assert identity within and beyond the frameworks of racial capitalism.
Central to Smith’s scholarship is the question of how the complexity of Black life emerging from the U.S. South can be held, circulated, and understood through photographic practice. They conceptualize portraiture as both a commodity and a vehicle of mobility: an object capable of exchange, dissemination, and transport. Like cotton, images of Black life have spread widely, yet portraiture also functions as a site of resistance, transformation, and self-definition, countering histories that sought to render Black subjects as property rather than persons.
In previous roles, Smith contributed to rotating exhibitions and managed photography collections at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and Boston University Libraries in Boston, MA. They hold an M.F.A. in Photography and Related Media from Rochester Institute of Technology.