ATHENS, GA.- In the summer of 1974, a graduate student (Raymond Smith) and his friend set off on a cross-country trip to see the United States. They drove an aging Volkswagen from New England through the South and into the Midwest, where the car gave up the ghost, but not before Smith photographed many of the people and places they encountered. Now, four decades later, Smith is exhibiting 52 of his photographs, all of which are hand printed.

The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will present “In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: Photographs by Raymond Smith,” an exhibition of these photographs, from October 24, 2015, through January 3, 2016. The exhibition is organized by curator Michael Panhorst, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.

Smith has sequenced the images so that the ensemble is more than the sum of the parts, and he has independently produced a book (published by Peter Hastings Falk Fine Arts Research and Publishing and available for purchase in the Museum Shop) that illustrates the photographs with commentary by historian Richard H. King and art historian Alexander Nemerov. Smith’s work draws on both his formal education in American Studies and the influence of photographers Robert Frank and Walker Evans (Smith’s mentor at Yale University).

Despite these influences, “In Time We Shall Know Ourselves” stands as an independent statement about America and about photography. Smith has written that his photography is “more closely related to literature, especially fiction . . . than it is to the other visual arts,” and that the “portrait is primary, and the photograph is a short story exploding beyond its frame.”

These vivid short stories create an epic travel narrative, a great American novel set in the 1970s. The photographs, book and exhibition serve not only as windows through which we see an earlier age, but also as mirrors in which, in time, we may learn something of ourselves.