Rodney has created a series of elaborate tableaux that illustrate innovations from Botox parties to virtual reality therapy to the return of brainwashing. Smith's work is immediately recognizable for it's slightly anachronistic formality, it's fascinating graphic composition and its air of polite surrealism. He studied photography with Walker Evans but also received a degree in theology, and he says that "a theological or existential element" drives his work. "I try to convey a sense of whimsy - to look at life and recognize a kind of precariousness, a delicacy, that we are all fallible and shouldn't take ourselves too seriously." This sense is underscored, in a paradoxical gesture that is part Keaton, part Margritte, by the very proper attire in which Smith's models are always clad. Smith himself is rarely seen without a suit and tie, even on the most arduous of shoots. "The world has lost a formality, a rigor, a discipline," he says. "Everything seems disheveled, not very orderly. Some would call that free, I call it chaotic." Who better, then, to photograph a year of chaotic thinking boiled down to an alphabetized catalog?- The New York Times Magazine