STILL TIME
8th May – 20th June 2026
A retrospective by Joseph P. Smith
Curated by Lisa Gwen Chetcuti
Detail from work by Joe Smith & Poster of STILL TIME
STILL TIME
A retrospective by Joseph P. Smith
Curated by Lisa Gwen Chetcuti
STILL TIME is a 50-year retrospective marking the photographic practice of Joseph P. Smith, bringing together decades of image-taking and making, into a distilled and immersive curated presentation.
At its core, the exhibition reflects on photography as an act of suspending time. Smith’s work captures fleeting, often unnoticed moments; images that exist in a state of in-betweenness, neither fully past nor present, but continually reactivated through the viewer’s gaze. In this sense, each photograph becomes both document and experience: a moment recorded, then re-lived.
Photography here is not simply observation, but a heightened act of seeing - of anticipating, framing, and revealing. As Susan Sontag suggests, “the photographer discloses,” and Smith’s practice embodies this revelation across five decades of sustained curiosity and visual sensitivity.
Structured across four thematic strands, the exhibition traverses shifts in subject, mood, and composition, while resisting fixed notions of time and place. Instead, it invites viewers into a fluid narrative - one where personal memory and collective recognition begin to overlap.
In Smith’s images, stillness carries movement. A solitary figure, the detail of a build, a suspended gesture - each image holds a quiet tension between presence and absence. Through this paradox, STILL TIME proposes photography as a temporal experience: a medium where the past is continually reactivated in the present.
Joseph P. Smith, received a standard academic education but on starting work with the MaltaGovernment in his late teens he continued his studies in the arts. His main interests encompass photography, painting and the graphic media. He studied graphic design in Florence, Italy and in 2015 he successfully read for a Masters Degree in Fine Art, Digital Arts at the University of Malta.
Joseph has had several solo exhibitions in Malta as well as overseas. In 1991 he had a solo exhibition on theatrical photography in Moscow and this was followed by others in the UK. In 2017 he had two solo exhibitions in Brussels and China after being selected as a participating artist in the Reunion project to celebrate Malta’s presidency of the EU. He has also participated in several collectives in Malta and abroad.
Joseph has been the recipient of numerous national and international awards including having five portraits selected in 3 editions of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2014, 2015 and 2021. In 2020 and 2022 his work was also awarded in the Portrait of Humanity Awards organised by the British Journal of Photography. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the BBA Photo Prize at BBA Gallery, Berlin.
Joseph has published two seminal photo documentary/anthropological volumes with the title “Survivors - The Ageing Population of Birgu” and is presently working on the third volume. Last year he took part in a 10-day residency at Art Print Residence in Barcelona, where he worked with photogravure and monotype techniques.