Ted Humble-Smith
Ted Humble-Smith (b.1971, England) has established himself as a leading creative and still life photographer over a 25-year career and a multifaceted life of creativity.
His fascination with photography was sparked at 16 when he began making images with an Olympus OM10. This was soon followed by the creation of a hand-built darkroom in his parents’ attic and a deep captivation with his imagery materialising on paper. With the encouragement of an inspiring art teacher, he studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design and subsequently moved to London to pursue his passion.
London exposed Ted to the commercial advertising world and he quickly began assisting a variety of renown photographers. These formative collaborations led to experience in creative advertising, travel around the world for album shoots, and archeological sites in the Middle East.
Ted is a true multidisciplinary artist and throughout his career he has personally designed and fabricated many of the ambitious sets used in his images, circumventing the trend to rely on digital interventions. He has a deep affinity with the natural world and is well versed at scouring the landscape in search of the perfect set elements; branches, stones, and driftwood are painstakingly worked into exactly what he has visualised while reading a brief. Lumps of oak were burnt, sanded, and transformed into golden carcasses for a whiskey advertisement, stones were cast into fossilised environments for Harrods, and ice was sculpted into mountains in a New York City studio for Smirnoff.
Ted’s work conveys an enduring interest in texture and fine detail and an innate talent for the elegant and compelling use of light. These qualities coupled with his dedication to fine craftsmanship are consistent hallmarks of his work. He has explained that his ambition is to ‘mimic what nature creates when in the studio, shaping and controlling light to release the beauty I see in mundane moments, a fallen wet leaf, the patterns left by a receding tide, or simply the contrasting light between foreground and background.’
Ted has created photographs for diverse clients including: GQ, Vogue, Glenfiddich, Mclaren F1, The British Army, Royal Academy of Engineering, Harrods, and De Beers. His 2016 project “Imagination” celebrated 400 years of Intellectual Property in the UK and was featured on the BBC’s The One Show. Recently, he collaborated with The Royal Academy of Engineering to conceptualise MacRobert Award winning innovations. The resulting portfolio of photographs was exhibited at The National Media Museum, and he was invited to speak about the project at the Edinburgh Science Festival in 2024.
Inspired by his life in Devon, Ted has recently begun exploring a variety of media to articulate his vision of the landscape. Having photographed patterns left on the sand by the receding tide for many years, he began to look for new approaches to capturing and immortalising the journey of water as it ebbs and flows across beaches. These studies form a long standing project entitled “Return” which follows the journey of water though its lifecycle, irrepressibly seeking to ‘return’ to the ocean, where its cyclical journey will yet again begin, bringing life, destruction and beauty to the landscape.
Casting these patterns with plaster has facilitated a 3 dimensional element to his work, with light playing an integral component of their display. These sculptural works allow lighting conditions to transform them; at times appearing flat and lifeless, and at others appearing full of lyrical definition and emotion.
As Ted’s practice develops and expands, he is experimenting with a variety of techniques and subjects, inclusive of direct printing of plants, hedge row flora, and timber. His selected subjects are illustrations of the life that water brings and the vibrant textures of decay. His imprints capture wood and its lifecycle, ever evolving and moving at a pace imperceptible to the human eye.
The Garden Gallery has been created as an ever evolving curation of Ted’s creative portfolio, in whatever form that happens to appear.