The Big Book: Volumes One and Two
"At first, the decision to reproduce the book down to the poor-quality images seems like a questionable choice - likely only to attract photo geeks. But over time the visual presentation grows on the reader and emphasizes the cohesive nature of Mr. Smith's book as a whole as opposed to a collection of individual photos."--NYT Lens Blog "This collection is a retrospective of the work of 20th-century documentary photographer W. Eugene Smith - a project Smith began in 1959, but wouldn't see come to fruition before he died in 1978. Smith was known for the photo essay, one in particular being the 1948 LIFE magazine essay "Country Doctor," in which he spent three weeks tracing the life of small-town Colorado physician Ernest Ceriani." - Kirsten Akens, Colorado Springs Independent "Gene Smith taught me how to print when I was young. I had always thought he was an interesting journalist photographer, and a kind man. Now I know, to my surprise, that he was a great book artist way ahead of his time."-Photo Eye Blog "War, death, birth, childhood, work, daily life, monumental events, race, racism, civil rights, it's all in there. Taken as a whole, it seems impossible to come away from The Big Book without a certainty that Smith was the most dedicated of humanists. That he was driven to undertake such a massive effort is, in and of itself, a major indication of Smith's drive to push the photographic language forward." - Photoblog "I think that reading the two volume maquette is similar in experience to a visit to Florence and viewing one of Michelangelo's partially complete sculptures, a raw and incomplete work, gaining a glimpse into the working of a very creative mind." - Emaho Magazine "Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith brought worldwide attention to social injustice and the disadvantaged with his intimate and provocative candid pictures. He deserves his reputation as the pioneer of humanistic photojournalism [...] In 1959, he began assembling a retrospective on what was then his life's work, giving it the title "The Big Book," also known as "The Walk to Paradise" and "The Total Book." He labored nearly three years on a mock-up to submit to publishers. It was a Herculean task. Massive in scale, it required two folio-sized volumes with 380 pages and 450 images. The structure and layout were unconventional and challenging. The book was universally rejected as commercially unviable and was never published - until now.[...] No doubt it will provide rich mining and discourse for academia, curators and steadfast photography buffs eager to ingest and examine this comprehensive study of Smith's technique, its historical context and ultimately his legacy. [...] Seeing "The Big Book" finally come to life is fascinating and remarkable." - Truth Dig "...The Center for Creative Photography and University of Texas Press made a bold, complicated decision to publish a facsimile of the surviving original, rather than redesigning a new book based on it, by inserting pristine reproductions of Smith's images in place of the maquette's Agfa Copyrapid reproductions (essentially fifty-year-old photocopies of Smith's original prints) that weren't meant for publication. ... You can hear cynics decrying, I want to see Smith's vaunted printing technique represented here, not glorified photocopies, and certainly not for $185! But the right decision was made." - The Paris Review