Daniel Smith: Corpus

Daniel Smith is a fine art photographer who is interested in the ways in which history and civilization annihilate individual identity.

“A “corpus” is a body. It can also refer to a collection of utterances which says something about their speaker. Linguists analyze the words and other signifiers in corpora to understand the identities of individuals and larger communities. My corpus is a collection of corpora—that is, bodies. This corpus of flesh communicates the physicality of identity, which becomes lost in lexical analysis. Here, the body is a self-signifier, the symbol of a material language. This “language” is existential and concrete, collapsing the sign into the signifier. My Corpus is not a collection of abstract data, which conceptualizes identity; it is a physical identity magnified through the collection of collective individuals.”