Tomoko Uemura in de armen van haar moeder
A mother with a deformed, agonized child. Smith was a photographer who doggedly pursued a subject. In 1971 he heard that the inhabitants of the Japanese fishing village of Minamata had been stricken by a mysterious affliction. A local factory had polluted the water with mercury. Smith embarked on a four-year long photography project following the people in their struggle to gain recognition.