Leslie Smith is a Laguna Beach and Baja, Mexico-based artist whose photographs explore the melding of beauty, movement, and transformation through water. Water’s fluidity—present in everything it touches—serves as a canvas for her new body of work, Bodies and Botanicals. Photographed in Mexico, Spain, and the Southwest U.S., the series brings together the human form and botanicals in fluid, layered compositions that hover between photography and painting. 

A film graduate of the ArtCenter College of Design, Smith began her career as a cinematographer and went on to direct and shoot over 500 TV commercials internationally. Her work was recognized by Kodak and featured in Adweek, Glamour, and Women Behind the Lens. She is a director member of the Director’s Guild of America.

A lifelong creator, Smith has been behind the lens, dancing, painting, designing furniture, crafting landscapes, and reimagining spaces for as long as she can remember. With Smith’s curious mind, she continued studies that included landscape architecture, horticulture and a masters in Spiritual Psychology, all of which now influence her creatively. 

Once guided by budgets and scripts, she now embraces creative processes rooted in freedom and spontaneity. Botanicals are available to shoot everywhere—no booking needed. Her models are friends and acquaintances of all ages and backgrounds—no wardrobe or makeup department in sight. Through the digital layering process, images emerge with unexpected harmonies of color, form, and light that could never be planned. Smith has always embraced life as one big experiment; her photographic endeavors are no exception.

Growing up in Arizona, water was always the destination, and she never takes for granted the gift of living by the ocean now. Her days are alive with movement and discovery, whether she’s creating, dancing, traveling, boogie boarding, or playing on the beach with her exuberant dog, Zoey.

Smith’s practice is guided by generosity and connection. Proceeds after expenses go to non profits, extending the creative exchange beyond her images. Fresh, striking and unusual,  Smith’s work moves us to reflect and meet our own imagination with each image. Each image is an invitation into a world created by Leslie with the unruly assistance of her rebellious yet poetic partner in creativity—water.