Al Smith

The floor is packed and the joint is bumpin’.

The year is 1946 and Seattleites have swarmed Seattle’s Civic Auditorium to see jazz great Lionel Hampton and his crew do their thing. At one point, bandleader Hampton dramatically leaps in the air — his hand raised above his head, clutching a drumstick — as the mixed-race crowd whoops, hollers and smiles at his onstage antics.

This dynamic, fleeting moment was caught on film by the discerning eye of Seattle photographer Albert “Al” Smith, in one of the thousands of photos he took from the late 1930s until his death in 2008. The heat, the commotion and the energy still translate today.

In capturing moments like these, Smith preserved decades of Black life: the city’s burgeoning jazz scene, swimming competitions at Madrona Beach, boxing matches, family gatherings.

No matter the occasion, Smith was there, camera in hand. While working a day job for the United States Postal Service, he meticulously kept copies of the tens of thousands of pictures he took over decades. Often his pictures were labeled on the back using his custom-made stamp, which read “Al Smith On the Spot” — a signature and a raison d’etre.

Today, Smith’s photos are celebrated in jazz circles and Seattle communities, thanks to several exhibitions and publications in recent years. But for most of his life, Smith saw photography largely as a hobby — and his work went under-recognized for decades.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early ’90s that Smith’s work as a documentarian of Seattle’s Black and other minority communities in the Central Area gained the recognition it deserved, after it came to the attention of Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) curator Howard Giske. Even then, the late photographer maintained a humble view of himself and his pictures.

“I was impersonating a photographer,” Smith told The Seattle Times in 1997. “If I did get an extraordinary shot, it was more luck than anything else.”

Born in 1916, Smith grew up in the Central District on 14th Avenue and East Madison Street, the son of Jamaican immigrants who had come to the United States after living for a period in Victoria, B.C. His Catholic parents were entrenched in Seattle’s very small West Indian community, and Smith spent his childhood playing with a mixed-race friend group of Black, Italian, and Japanese kids from the neighborhood.

At 12 he received a Kodak Brownie camera as a present and immediately fell in love with photography. He used the simple cardboard camera to snap pictures of friends, family and his surroundings.

The young Smith also had a healthy appetite for exploring, and as a preteen would ride his bicycle to Tacoma or hop freight trains to far-off locales like Denver. “He was adventurous,” his son, Al “Butch” Smith, Jr., remembers of his father.

Smith matriculated to O’Dea High School, where he was, according to his son, the first Black student. Despite an all-star basketball career (he was on the 1933 city championship team), his lust for life dogged him. He dropped out of school during his senior year, in 1935, to join the Merchant Marines, becoming a steward aboard vessels like the SS President Grant and the USS Ruth Alexander, passenger ships that cruised the Pacific, hitting stops in China, Japan and the Philippines.

During his time abroad, Smith seized an opportunity to buy a German Ikoflex 2 ¼ camera, a hefty piece of hardware that came home with him when he officially returned to Seattle in 1941. That year he married his sweetie, Isabelle “Izzy” Donaldson, and worked on a shipyard in Bremerton while living in Seattle during World War II.

Lacking formal training in photography, he buddied up with Charles Johnson, a fellow Black photographer and Army vet from Seattle whom he met at a photography store. Johnson took Smith under his wing and taught him some basics.

Smith’s return to Seattle coincided with a magnificent flourishing of the city’s jazz scene. During World War II, thousands of Black families migrated from the South to the West Coast, many landing in Seattle, where industrial jobs were abundant. They brought with them Southern culture — and a love for jazz.

The era’s segregation laws limited the after-hours venues where local Black musicians and fans could gather, and most — of some 34 clubs — were located on Jackson Street between Third and 14th Avenues.

In the ’40s, big names like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Hazel Scott performed at various local joints. A jazz fan himself, Smith headed to clubs like Basin Street on Maynard armed with his camera. He became a mainstay in several spots, photographing attendees one week, then returning the next to sell them the prints.

“I took photos in the clubs to make a little money,” Smith told The News Tribune in 1993. “There was a lot of excitement down there. It was another world.”

Smith had a knack for composing fantastic photos of jazz players and clubgoers at these venues. He snapped Cab Calloway crooning into a mic, dressed in a light suit; the floor at a concert cleared for two dancers doing the jitterbug; a group of men and women dressed to the nines at a Black and Tan event.

In one shot, Erskine Hawkins toots his trumpet as a fan named Helen Truhill smiles at the camera from the crowd. Another reveals an intimate backstage moment with influential choreographer and social activist Katherine Dunham as she puts on an earring before a show, a short reflectful moment before she heads out onstage.

And then there’s Count Basie’s Orchestra, which Smith captured mid-song as the guitarist and drummer rip and roar away in the foreground and the horn section gaze out into the crowd, waiting for their turn.

Smith’s suite of photos offers a window into Black social life at the time — a community that was dancing, drinking and gathering with some of the biggest musicians of the day, despite being largely ignored by Seattle’s mainstream society.

“He managed to communicate in photography — in a two-dimensional medium — the vibrancy of the music and the joy between the people who were making it and the people who were receiving it,” says Seattle jazz historian and music journalist Paul de Barros, who used several of Smith’s photographs in his 1993 book Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz.

“When I look at his best photographs I don’t feel like I’m just looking at musicians," de Barros says. "I feel like I’m looking at musicians who are playing for people.”

From the early 1940s through the late ’50s, while still working for the Postal Service, Smith ran a side business called On the Spot, taking pictures of birthdays, weddings and big life events in the Black community. He shot the photos with his Ikoflex (which he later upgraded to a Speed Graphic 4x5), developed prints in his kitchen sink, then sold the pictures for 50 cents each.

Smith spent less time in nightclubs toward the late 1940s and early ’50s. By then he was busy raising his growing family: Butch, born in 1942; Cheryl, born in 1952; and Omenka, whom Smith and Izzy adopted in 1953.

Still, Smith brought his camera everywhere he went. A man about town, he documented parades, boxing matches, important meetings of the minds and other important events in the city’s Japanese, Chinese and Filipino communities.

He snapped a picture of a pensive young Thurgood Marshall standing at a lectern at Mount Zion Baptist Church in March 1947; captured Mardi Gras royalty on a balloon-filled float in 1952 and Chinese dancers in a parade in 1953; photographed Sonny Norris — Seattle’s first Black lifeguard — surveying the water on a sunny day from his perch at Madrona Beach in 1955; and photographed artists working on a City Light tile mosaic in 1958.

Smith and his wife enjoyed a lively social life among the city’s Black middle class and were prominent lifelong members of Immaculate Conception Church. He was also the lone non-Japanese American member of a local Japanese American photography club, a testament to both his openness and skill within the larger Seattle community.

Many pictures in Smith’s archive depict unscripted moments with other families, from intimate backyard portraits to days at the beach — plus an abundance of lovingly candid shots of his wife, Izzy.

In his Central District home, located on 23rd Avenue and East Fir Street, he stored pictures, negatives and slides in shopping bags and boxes around his house, a habit he gleaned from his grandmother, Sarah M. Whitney, who saved everything. Then, in the late 1980s, local historians and preservationists became aware of Smith’s historically significant treasure trove.

According to his son, Smith knew he had something of importance. “He said, ‘In order for me to learn how to protect my photographs and my negatives — and to do this right — I need some help,’” Butch recalls. So in 1986, Smith began volunteering at MOHAI, developing some of the museum’s negatives in a darkroom.

After a few months, he revealed to MOHAI photography curator Howard Giske that he was something of a photographer himself. He shared a few photos and Giske immediately realized the significance of Smith’s work.

“He brought in some of his photographs he had taken early in the history of Seattle — 1930s, ’40s and later, and he knocked us out. His pictures were just wonderful,” Giske told the South Seattle Emerald in 2017. “We immediately gave him a small exhibit just outside the library and darkroom where he was working, and followed that up a few years later with a bigger show.”

Thus began a long friendship between Smith and Giske, who’d go on to give the photographer his first retrospective, more than 50 years after Smith started his photography career. The 1993 exhibition, Jazz on the Spot: Photographs by Al Smith, focused on his depictions of Seattle’s jazz scene and served as a crescendo to his life’s work. Pictures of Smith at the event show the photographer grinning broadly with, of course, a camera hanging around his neck.

“We are so lucky to have a document of that part of society,” says de Barros, whose Jackson Street After Hours book launch coincided with Smith’s Jazz on the Spot exhibition. “Nobody wrote about these people in the newspaper. The most important things happening musically in town were pretty much entirely missed by the mainstream media.”

Smith passed in 2008 with many of his images still in need of sorting. In 2014 his family donated the archive to MOHAI for preservation and safekeeping, and for several months afterward, Butch, his sister, and other longtime Seattle residents met weekly to sort and identify people, places and events in Smith’s extraordinary catalogue. Their efforts led to Seattle on the Spot, a 2017 MOHAI exhibition that highlighted a broader swath of Smith’s depictions of Black life.

Outside of MOHAI’s exhibitions, Smith’s photos have found permanent public homes around the city, such as along the corridors of the historic Washington Hall and at Converge Media HQ, where rows of his photos combine to form a giant mural visible in nearly every in-studio interview the Black-focused media organization conducts.

In that sense, the city that Smith so dutifully reflected in his photographs now reflects him back onto the city.