“The easiest thing to say about Raymond Smith is that he follows in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Evans was his photography teacher at Yale in the early 1970s and Frank’s book The Americans (1958) is a source Smith acknowledges for his own book. But neither of these associations touches the deepest energy of Smith’s photographs… Traveling far and wide, Smith sought out his subjects in a way reminiscent of Evans and Frank. But unlike those photographers he was animated by a sense of the town studio as the place and soul of his interstate pictures…In Time We Shall Know Ourselves is like other notable projects of the 1970s that asserted the power of the vernacular.”
— Alexander Nemerov
