by Gerald Boerner
“The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“With considerable soul searching, that to the utmost of my ability, I have let truth be the prejudice.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“… to became neighbours and friends instead of journalists. This is the way to make your finest photographs.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“I forgot to duck but I got a wonderful shot of those who did… my policy of standing up when the others are down finally caught up with me.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“I…made brash, dashing interpretive photographs which were overly clever and with too much technique.., with great depth of field, very little depth of feeling, and with considerable ‘success’.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“I was after a set of pictures, so that when people looked at them they would say, ‘This is war’–that the people who were in the war would believe that I had truthfully captured what they had gone through… I worked in the framework that war is horrible. I want to carry on what I have tried to do in these pictures. War is a concentrated unit in the world and these things are clearly and cleanly seen. Things like race prejudice, poverty, hatred and bigotry are sprawling things in civilian life, and not so easy to define as war.”
— W. Eugene Smith
“I [Smith] use literature, music and I try to get them [the students] to see in a small ways by teaching them responsibility. For instances, I had a little bottle that said SCOTCH on it and I kept ducking behind the desk to pour myself a drink from it. Everyone was wild, taking pictures of me, trying to sneak a picture of me sneaking a drink. After a while I said: “Okay, you’ve been photographing me drinking from this bottle, so you will distribute pictures to show that I drink while teaching. But you’ve never asked me what’s in the bottle. It’s a bottle of cider – you are very bad reporters!”
— W. Eugene Smith
W. Eugene Smith (1918 – 1978)
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.
Smith graduated from Wichita North High School in 1936. He began his career by taking pictures for two local newspapers, The Wichita Eagle (morning circulation) and the Beacon (evening circulation). He moved to New York City and began work for Newsweek and became known for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939. He soon resigned from Life, too. In 1942 he was wounded while simulating battle conditions for Parade magazine.
As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and then Life again, Smith entered World War II on the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, he continued at Life and perfected the photo essay from 1947 to 1954.
In 1950, he was sent to the United Kingdom to cover the General Election, in which the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was narrowly victorious. Life had taken an editorial stance against the Labour government. In the end, a limited number of Smith’s photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life.
Smith severed his ties with Life over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of Albert Schweitzer. Upon leaving Life, Smith joined the Magnum photo agency in 1955. There he started his project to document Pittsburgh. This project was supposed to take him three weeks, but spanned three years and tens of thousands of negatives. It was too large to ever be shown, although a series of book-length photo essays were eventually produced.
From 1957 to 1965 he took photographs and made recordings of jazz musicians at a Manhattan loft. shared by David X. Young, Dick Cary and Hall Overton.
Complications from his longterm consumption of drugs, notably Amphetamine (taken to enable his workaholic tendencies), and alcohol led to a massive stroke, from which Smith died in 1978.
Contributions
Smith was perhaps the originator and arguably the master of the photo-essay. In addition to Pittsburgh, these works include Nurse Midwife, Minamata, Country Doctor, and Albert Schweitzer – A Man of Mercy.
Then came the war. In 1942 Gene Smith became a war correspondent first for Ziff-Davis (Flying and Popular Photography) and later for Life. Smith photographed the war, briefly in the Atlantic but most of the time in the bloody island-to-island fighting in the Pacific. During that time he was involved in 26 carrier combat missions and 13 invasions. He was in Okinawa on D-Day and hitch-hiked twelve hundred miles to Guam to be sure that his pictures would get the fastest possible delivery back to Life. Then he returned to the invasion on the first plane on which a correspondent could arrive.
Always known as a photographer who would take almost any chance if it meant getting the picture, Gene Smith’s good luck throughout the Pacific deserted him on May 23, 1945. While on the east coast of Okinawa photographing an essay titled "A Day in the Life of a Front Line Soldier," he was seriously wounded by a Japanese shell fragment. The missile hit him in the head cutting both cheeks, injuring his tongue and knocking out several teeth. Characteristically, he was taking pictures at the time and the fragment passed through his left hand before entering his cheek just below the eye and near the nose. His comment in the hospital later: "I forgot to duck but I got a wonderful shot of those who did… my policy of standing up when the others are down finally caught up with me."
Smith’s war wounds cost him two painful years of hospitalization and plastic surgery. During these years he took no pictures and whether he would ever be able to return to photography was doubtful. Then one day, during his period of convalescence, Smith took a walk with his two children and even though it was still intensely painful for him to operate a camera, came back with one of the most famous photographs of all time: "A Walk to Paradise Garden." This memorable image was to serve as the final picture in the famous "Family of Man" Exhibition.
Today, Smith’s legacy lives on through the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund to promote "humanistic photography." Since 1980, the fund has awarded photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.
Woodstock
At the Woodstock Festival in August of 1969 I was taking a general crowd scene photograph by the side of a road when I saw Smith through my viewfinder. He had just driven into the photo and parked his car alongside of the road. I couldn’t quite believe it, because the New York freeway was jammed up. Somehow he had made it through. I walked up to him, with a Leica M-3 around my neck, and he remembered me from Oregon. He had just got to Woodstock after spending some time photographing Bob Dylan in New York City.
We spent the afternoon of the first day together walking around and taking photos. I was at Woodstock with some friends from the underground newspaper that we worked for in New Orleans. We ran into Millie, one of the writers, and the three of us had a simple lunch provided by Ken Kesey’s Hog Farm in the middle of a green pasture. Smith seemed very sympathetic with the peace movement of that time and, I think, felt right at home at Woodstock.
He could create a space for himself to give himself the freedom to take photographs. He was so humble that he could melt into the camera, be the camera and be a part, and subject, of whatever he chose to photograph.
I had heard through Jim Hughes that Smith’s daughter was at the Woodstock Festival but I don’t think that they connected. Hughes wrote "Shadow and Substance", a biography of Smith that is excellent reading.
There was a lot of magic at Woodstock. Some of it was probably the anarchic aspect, yet the citizens of Woodstock respected one another, including the police. National Guard jets roaring over the scene casting an immense peace sign with the vapor trails, "high in the sky". So much music and famous performers and so much rain and so many people. Many shamans and spiritual healers were there, true gypsies. It was true for me and having an afternoon with W. Eugene Smith, my photographic idol, was a huge personal magic.
The Photo Essay: Pittsburgh
An assignment which normally would have taken two to three-and-a-half weeks to complete was turned into a tortuous three-year ordeal by W. Eugene Smith that resulted in his essentially unfinished masterpiece, the ‘Pittsburgh" story. He made 11,000 negatives over five months in 1955 and a few weeks in 1957. During this time, Smith’s marriage was breaking up, his health deteriorated, he was threatened with a lawsuit, he ran up huge debts with the agency Magnum Photos, and he went bankrupt himself, leaving his family near destitution, despite the two successive Guggenheim Fellowships he received.
He saw in this commission the opportunity to expand the form of the photographic essay to the dimension of "an epic in the tradition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass" (W. S. Johnson). Smith moved to Pittsburgh where he improvised a darkroom in his apartment and hired an assistant and a local guide. Working with relentless intensity, he invested all of his financial resources in the project. This project was hampered not only by Smith’s often self-destructive personality and stubhotness, but also by bad luck and legal complications. Lorant’s book finally appeared only in 1964 (with 64 of Smith’s images).
Attempting to salvage the work, Magnum arranged for publishing agreements with Look and Life, but they collapsed because Smith, dissatisfied with the page layouts, kept modifying them in an attempt to weave a complex fabric of themes and metaphors with multiple connotations and resonance. The Pittsburgh story has never been published in any form approaching his book-length intentions. The most complete version, in his own layout, comprising 88 photographs covering 37 pages, was published in 1959 Photography Annual. Smith considered it a failure.
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
W. Eugene Smith that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Eugene_Smith
Other References:
Masters of Photography: W. Eugene Smith’s Photoessay (Pittsburgh)
http://masters-of-photography.com/S/smith/smith_articles3.html
Masters of Photography: W. Eugene Smith by Tony Hayden
http://masters-of-photography.com/S/smith/smith_articles2.html
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