Jack Smith was a visionary American filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist. Smith was able to get his co-travelers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events, adopting lowly, discarded film materials, in other words trash, marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, to provide the grounds for transmogrification, with almost incredible results. Smith’s life and work demonstrate that a condition of absolute lack is not necessarily to be equated with inadequacy. An ostensibly deprived state can in fact be inspiring occasion to reconsider the meaning of art, the role of the artist and artistic valuation.