Both personal and poetic, Smith's work explores the role of the photograph in time and memory, place and history. Examining the idea of the family photograph as a personal history, Smith notes that "looking back at family photos we can see, sometimes for the first time, those things that were harbingers of the future; when I make photos I wonder what I am really seeing - what clues are here that I am missing?" This sense of a moment captured from an unfolding story, extending back into an intricate past and forwards into an opaque future, shifts Smith's photographs beyond the personal to a mapping of the ways in which human lives evolve as narratives. Smith's 2005 exhibition, Catching Icarus, suggested that these apparently insigificant narratives may be as dramatic, as tragic, as joyful and as powerful as those of myths. The lucid beauty of Smith's photographs lies in their evocation of childhood, of the moments of innocence and uncertainty that reveal the rich, complicated bonds of family and love.

In her most recent exhibition, Smith's starkly beautiful images, shot in the pine forests of Northland, subtly explore New Zealand's colonial history through the presence of colonial interlopers on the land: churches, people, cows grazing, a disused trig station and even the pines themselves.