Born in New Orleans, Michael Proctor Smith grew up in the suburb of Metairie. After graduating from Metairie Park Country Day School, Smith attended Tulane University. Smith’s photographic career began in 1966 when he became fascinated with the African American culture in his native New Orleans. As a graduate student at Tulane University, he made photographs for its jazz archive, discovering a subject and a documentary style of working that engaged him for the rest of his life.

During the last four decades of the twentieth century, Smith became one of the best-known photographers of his hometown, New Orleans. The author of five photo collections, Smith photographed each New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival from 1970 until 2004. While his photos of individual musicians brought him fame, Smith’s work also provides a valuable visual record of New Orleans’s brass bands, social aid and pleasure club parades, jazz funerals, neighborhood Mardi Gras celebrations, and spiritual churches.