Diamond Untitled.2

Since 2012, Paul Anthony Smith has been making “picotage” photographs, borrowing from an 18th-century French technique used to create intricately patterned textiles. Using a ceramic tool to pick away at the surface of his images, Smith applies this technique to create triangle- and diamond-shaped patterns over photographs he has taken on trips back to Jamaica, where he was born, in neighborhoods he refers to as “non-tourist locations.” Many of Smith’s photos are black-and-white or a shade of blue, a decision that connects them to memory and distances them from conventional tourist depictions of the Caribbean as a colorful place.