Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith

Harry Smith spent almost twenty years picking paper airplanes up off the streets of New York City — 251 of them, all told — and this photobook catalogues every one, in photographs, along with the odd bits of lore that seem to trail behind objects nobody thought worth keeping.

Smith was a filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist, and occultist — one of the defining polymaths of beat culture and the American avant-garde. His experimental films still shape how artists think about the medium, and his three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music is often credited with sparking the American folk revival that followed. He took his collections of ordinary, overlooked objects just as seriously as his art, and the paper airplanes rank among the strangest of them — an entire aeronautic history assembled from what everyone else stepped over.

This is Volume One of The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné, the series that indexes his eclectic research obsessions in full photographic detail. It's a record of how one relentlessly curious, deeply idiosyncratic mind looked at the world — treating the ordinary and the discarded as worth saving, worth studying, worth keeping.

Published by J&L Books in association with Anthology Film Archives.