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Still TimeA retrospective by Joe Smith
Curated by Lisa Gwen Chetcuti
Exhibition Opening: 8th May 2026 | 7pm - 10pm
Exhibition Dates: 9th May – 20th June 2026 | Wed - Sat | 2pm - 7pm (closed public holidays)
RSVP encouraged https://forms.gle/hf5BT5VSK6GY1cp56
Entrance is free
VALLETTA CONTEMPORARY
15, 16, 17, East Street, Valletta
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.
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Event Venue
15,16,17 Triq Lvant (East Street), VLT1253 Valletta, Malta, 17 Triq il-Lvant, Valletta, VLT, Malta
Tickets
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