The Famous Photographer Whose Photograph Shocked the World
By: Reginald Ben-Halliday
Tags: Photojournalism, History, World War II, Culture, Photography

Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas. His mother was a photographer and his father a businessman working in the Wichita area. As a child, smith was interested in flying and aviation. When he was nine years old, He would plead to his mother to buy him pictures of airplanes.

But instead of buying him what he wanted, his mother gave him her old camera in hopes that he would begin to take pictures of airplanes by himself. Smith would come to his mother with a full roll of shots and she would develop the films for him in her darkroom.

Smith started grade school in 1924, attending a Catholic school in his home town and high school in 1933.

His real work as a photographer started at the age of fourteen, when he was taking pictures of airplanes at the Wichita airport. He was encouraged by Frank Noel, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who found his work interesting, to contribute occasional photographs to news sources in his home town. Three years later, smith began working for The Wichita Eagle and The Wichita Beacon, two local newspapers in Wichita.

In 1936, smith’s father shot himself with a shotgun in a hospital parking lot just a month before his son’s high school graduation. The sensationalism of the newspaper’s coverage of his father’s death made smith hate dishonest journalism. It got to a point that he almost decided to quit journalism, but a friend helped change his mind saying, “Honesty is not of a profession, but within the individual and what he brings to his work.” It was in this series that he made a promise to himself to hold himself to the highest standards of truth no matter the cost.

At the age of 19, smith had won a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. After one semester smith left the school, moved to New York City and began to work for Newsweek magazine. He was known there for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. He was later fired from the company when he failed to abandon the miniature camera he preferred to work with.

In 1938, smith began as a freelance photographer for the Black Star agency and in 1939 his skills with his camera landed him a job in Life magazine.

Smith spent three years at Life magazine, doing ordinary mundane assignments. But during this time, smith discovered the world of music. He started a record collection that grew to over 25,000 records. He once said “I learned much more from music, literature, the stage and the other arts than I ever learned from photography… I picked up timing and sense of drama, and also how to relate pictures together.”

Also In that three years smith was married to Carmen Martinez and a year later they had their first child named Marissa. Smith resigned his contract with Life Magazine in 1942 and did freelance jobs in New York for a while.

Smith was injured while shooting an assignment for Parade Magazine. He then began to have interest in World War II, but his injury kept him from military service.

Smith later joined the staff of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company and was assigned to the aircraft carriers Independence and Bunker Hill. He took photographs of the battles that went on in Wake Island, Rabual, Tarawa, Naru Island, Kavieng, and the Mariana Islands. He then returned home to New York for leave and resigned his contract with Ziff-Davis.

Smith went back to work as a staff photographer at Life magazine in 1944. He went on to take photos on the front lines in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Taking photographs of the invasions of Saipan, Guam, and Okinawa. While taking photographs of the battles in Okinawa, Smith was injured badly in the head, chest and back by mortar fire. He returned to New York to recover.

“My photographs might not be the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war — the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again… Each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation of war.” — W. Eugene Smith

In 1946, Smith took his first photograph after two years of undergoing numerous surgeries. He titled the photograph The Walk to Paradise Garden. The photograph depicts two of his children walking in the garden of his home in New York. It became one of his most famous photographs when Edward Steichen used it as one of his key images in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, which Steichen curated in a Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1955.

Smith returned to Life magazine again in 1947. During this period Smith had produced a lot of photo essays for them. Some of those photo essays became Smiths most influential and important works. Three of which — ‘Country Doctor’ ‘Spanish Village’ And ‘Nurse Midlife’ gained Smith greater fame and was able to raise the conscious level of the world. His works shows very important human experiences such as pain, compassion, grief, fear, strength, birth, death, beauty. Smith’s pictures were viewed as universal symbols.

Smith’s photographed a photo-essay about the hectic work of Maude E. Callen, a black nurse midwife working in the rural area of South Carolina. Her story touched the hearts of the American readers, causing them to donate money to build her a clinic in Pineville, South Carolina in 1953.

The final photo essay that Smith did for Life magazine was a story of Albert Schweitzer on how he dealt with his missionary work with leprosy victims in Africa. But unfortunately few of his photos for that project were extensively manipulated and this cause Smith to resign from Life magazine.

Smith joined Magnum photo agency in 1955. He was then assigned by Stefan Lorant to go to Pittsburgh to do a small project that was supposed to take him three weeks to complete. He was given a budget of $1.200 and a $500 advance to do the project.

He saw in this assignment an opportunity to expand the form of photographic essay. Smith moved to Pittsburgh, hired an assistant and built a space with a dark room in it. Working intensely, he put a lot of his own money into the project, creating over 11000 photographic negatives. A project that was supposed to take him three weeks to complete took him three years.

Photo historian William S Johnson, wrote about the Pittsburgh essay “The Pittsburgh essay, composed of thousands of photographs, was an astonishing act of creative energy and talent. In every other way it was a disaster for Smith. During those years he drove himself into financial bankruptcy and physical and emotional breakdowns in his obsessive urge to complete the story as he wished.”

Smith received two grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to help him finish the project.

About that same time he was commissioned by the American Institute of Architects to do ten 18 foot long transparencies of contemporary American architecture. This project was entitled “Ten Buildings in America’s Future.” It was his first major work in color.

Smith’s reputation grew higher than ever by the end of the 1950. His works at Pittsburgh were amazing, but it cost him his health and marriage. In 1957 smith divorced his wife and moved into a loft on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Through the windows of his home, he would take pictures of the seasonal changes and events happening outside. He titled his work “As From My Window I Sometimes Glance”, and “The Loft From Inside In” essays.

In 1959, part of his “As From My Window I Sometimes Glance” essay was published in Life magazine and given a title called ‘Drama Beneath A City Window.’ At this time smith was recognized as one of the top 10 greatest photographers in the world by an international poll conducted by Popular Photography Magazine.

During the later end of the 1960s Smith wrote and taught about photography. He did not produce any work that matched his previous accomplishments, but he did do some smaller projects on Woodstock, a small town in Ohio, a trip across the United States, and demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, Smith married Aileen Mioko, a Japanese-American photographer. Smith and his new wife moved to Minamata, a fishing village in Japan, to begin his final and perhaps his greatest project “Minamata”.

The couple had planned to stay in the village for three months but ended up staying for three years. The people of the village of Minamata were suffering from a strange disease called Minamata disease — a disease caused by mercury being released to the ocean by a company called Chisso. The couple began documenting the struggles by the disease victims to gain compensation from the chemical company for their destroyed lives.

In 1972, Smith was badly injured during a confrontation between the disease victims and Chisso Company employees near Tokyo. The employees tried to silence him from publishing the effects of Minamata disease to the world.

According to a witness “Smith and his wife, armed with camera and tape-recorder, accompanied a group of victims to record a meeting the group expected to have with an official of the company. The official failed to show up. But, suddenly, a group of about 100 men, on orders from the company, crowded into the room. They hit him first. They grabbed him and kicked me in the crotch and snatched the cameras, then hit him in the stomach. Then they dragged him out and picked him up and slammed his head on the concrete.” Smith survived the incident, but with a limited vision in one eye. Smith sought medical treatment in the U.S. for his injuries.

One of his most famous photographs taken in Minamata, was the one with a woman and her severely deformed child, naked in a traditional Japanese bathing chamber. There was a lot of speculation that the Uemura family was making a lot of money from the publication of the photograph which wasn’t the case.

The photograph was withdrawn from circulation in respect of the Parents’ wishes. And was later release in 1997 by the Tomoko’s father. It became a symbolic photograph of Smith’s work in 1974.

After Minamata, Smith and Aileen divorced and Smith moved back to New York. In 1977, Smith’s friends were alarmed by his deteriorating health and decided to arrange for him to begin teaching photography at the University Of Arizona.

He moved to Arizona, to begin his teaching and to organize his archives. But a month later he suffered a stroke. He survived it but a year later a second stroke took his life on October 15, 1978.