by Ralph Schwartz
Edmund Smith of Mount Vernon will show photographs of alcoholics who have changed their lives for the better, in “Portraits in Recovery,” a show opening Monday at the Lincoln Theatre. Smith is a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser, who has been sober for more than nine years.
On a cold January morning in Seattle inside the trash-filled car that was his home, Edmund Smith decided his life had to change.
He woke up to find his face frozen to one of the car’s windows. After he pulled away, some of his skin was still stuck to the glass.
In that moment, the promising professional photographer, who not long before had owned a studio, couldn’t ignore or deaden the pain of a life governed by drugs and alcohol.
“I started crying,” Smith recalled. “I was afraid I was going to die — freeze to death, get shot or get beaten.”
Smith, who now lives in Mount Vernon, was an alcoholic by the time he was 30 years old. He used inheritance money to start his portrait studio, but the business foundered within a few years. Families would show up at his studio
to be photographed only to find the door inexplicably locked.
Then the inheritance money ran out. Smith sold his equipment to keep the booze and the chemicals flowing.
“Everything literally went up in smoke ... just spiraled down and got worse and worse and worse,” Smith said.
After that morning in his car, Smith called a friend who attended 12-step meetings and decided to start going to them himself. He moved in with his mother for a few years while he put his life back together. He said he hasn’t had a drink or taken a drug since his wake-up call more than nine years ago.
And he’s taken up his camera again.
Over the past six months, Smith, 40, has chosen to capture images of people he understands all too well — fellow recovering alcoholics and addicts. Smith’s “Portraits in Recovery” will be on display at the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Mount Vernon starting Monday.
The show is partly about a community. People in recovery find strength in numbers.
“I couldn’t have gotten sober without the strength of those other people,” Smith said. “I think that it’s important that people know that people in recovery are strong and have a lot of integrity.”
Smith has shown his works at the Lincoln before — a series of photographs of stones and driftwood taken at the ocean. Smith’s fine-art tastes usually run in this natural-abstract vein. His next Lincoln show was to be more of the same, but then Smith’s half-brother died in February, losing his battle with pain pills and alcohol.
That’s when Smith decided to create a show about survivors of alcoholism.
His subjects, who will be identified by first name only, have come a long way. They used to measure time by the next crack hit, the next injection of heroin, or the next night spent in a gutter with a bottle. These same people now are business leaders, mothers, counselors, probation officers.
“We have a tendency in our society to look at people with addictions and think that they’re done for, but the reality is, there’s hope,” Smith said.
Smith has a day job, working as a chemical dependency professional for a treatment center in Lynnwood. Greg Bauer, the center’s executive director, said he sees hope in Smith’s images. After all, the dozen or so people who will be in the exhibit are far from unique.
“There’s literally thousands of people probably in the Skagit Valley that are in recovery,” Bauer said. “There are so many people out there, their faces are anonymous. ... We’ll never see their picture in the Lincoln Theatre.”
Smith has returned to commercial photography. He’s had his own portrait business in Mount Vernon for five years. At work, Smith takes a hands-on approach to his product. He makes sure the photos look good for the customers. For his Lincoln show, Smith didn’t retouch the images or pose his subjects for a more flattering effect. He merely asked them to do whatever came naturally to them in front of the lens.
The gaze of the man named Tom, who is missing an arm, doesn’t waver from the camera. The mother holding her daughter conjures a half-smile that suggests some mixture of serenity and troubled memory.
The story of a 91-year-old woman, 40 years sober, is practically written on the lines in her face.
“It’s very exposed. It’s very raw,” Smith said.
Smith asked his subjects to tell him what recovery meant to them, so he could put some words under the photos in the show.
“It saved my life,” one person offered, “and no matter what happened after I got sober I always kept two feet on the floor.”
Smith’s photos transcend the simplicity of recovery’s vernacular. They reveal something deep about the addicts he has shot. They have, after all, lived in two very different worlds in the same lifetime.
For Smith, the project has been a spiritual exercise.
“I’m not a person who attends church often, so for me I’m somebody who finds my spirituality through my art form,” Smith said.
“It’s been a wonderful blessing I can enjoy because of my recovery.”
Ralph Schwartz can be reached at 360-416-2138 or .
