1000+ images about William Eugene Smith on Pinterest | Spanish, Maze and Interview Forward The American Society of Media Photographers recently discovered the transcript of an interview of Mr. Smith, conducted by the great portraitist Philippe Halsmann and the society’s first president. The interview apparently took place in New York during an American Society of Media Photographers meeting in 1956, although the organization is unsure of the date. The transcript has been lightly edited. photo: W. Eugene Smith - SPAIN. Extremadura. Province of Caceres. Deleitosa. - 1951 See More William Eugene Smith Photographer - All About Photo Biography: Nationality: American | Born: 1918 - Died: 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 using a 35mm camera. In 1945 he was wounded while photographing battle conditions in the Pacific theater of World War II. 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 ever to 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. In January 1972, Smith was attacked by Chisso employees near Tokyo, in an attempt to stop him from further publicizing the Minamata disease to the world.Although Smith survived the attack, his sight in one eye deteriorated.

Smith and his Japanese wife lived in the city of Minamata from 1971 to 1973 and took many photos as part of a photo essay detailing the effects of Minamata disease, which was caused by a Chisso factory discharging heavy metals into water sources around Minamata. One of his most famous works, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, taken in December 1971 and published a few months after the 1972 attack, drew worldwide attention to the effects of Minamata disease. Complications from his longterm consumption of drugs, notably amphetamines (taken to enable his workaholic tendencies), and alcohol led to a massive stroke, from which Smith died in 1978. He is buried in Crum Elbow Cemetery, Pleasant Valley, New York. 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. 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. Source Wikipedia William Eugene Smith 1971 or 1972 - Minamata, Japan In the early 1970s, William Eugene Smith lived with Aileen Mioko Sprauge Smith, his wife, in Minamata, Japan. William Eugene Smith took this photo, and together with the help of Aileen Mioko Sprauge Smith and Ishikawa Takeshi, a local photographer, many other photos were taken of the effects of long term environmental industrial mercury poisoning on the local population. Here, on the Japanese Island of Kyushu, we see an image of an outwardly healthy mother bathing her fetal-poisoned 16 year old daughter, Tomoko Uemura, grotesquely deformed, physically crippled and blind since birth due to environmental industrial mercury poisoning in the local Minamata, Japan, water supply. This may well be the first environmental pollution photojournalism. Note also the invariable comparison to Michelangelo Buonarroti 's Pieta .

The photograph is from a series on industrial pollution by William Eugene Smith and Aileen Mioko Sprauge Smith for which they jointly received the World Understanding Award-U.S.A. William Eugene Smith, who was severely beaten by goons hired by the offending chemical company, also received the Robert Capa Gold Modal-U.S.A. for "photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise." Minolta 16mm f/2.8 Lens William Eugene Smith 1972 - Minamata, Japan Pouring its wastes into the air as well as the waters, the Chisso chemical complex dominates the city of Minamata. Waste chemicals, dumped into the bay, worked their way up the food chain to the people of the city and caused what has come to be known as Minamata Disease. 500x337 57kb William Eugene Smith 1972 - Minamata, Japan Plaintiffs demonstrate with photos of their dead on the last day of the trial in October 1972. The court victory could only offer money in return for life and normalcy.

500x346 53kb William Eugene Smith 1972 - Minamata, Japan An aide mops the brow of Chisso's President Shimada during one of the grueling negotiating sessions for compensation. This image is a stark comparison to the photo of Tomoko Uemura being bathed by her mother above . Visit The National Institute for Minamata Disease at for more information. 322x500 60kb Loosely from The Encyclopedia of Photography, by Michael Busselle, 1983, Octopus Books Limited, and Let Truth Be the Prejudice, W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs, by Ben Maddow and the staff at Aperture, 1985, Aperture: William Eugene Smith was born in Witchita, Kansas, in 1918. He was raised Catholic by Nettie Smith, his mother, who was a photographer who had a darkroom at home. William Eugene Smith wanted to fly, and ordered pictures of airplanes through the mail - his mother refused to pay, suggesting that he take her camera to the airfield and get his own pictures. A photographer was born!

William Eugene Smith became a local Witchita, Kansas, news photographer at the age of 15. He won a scholarship to learn photography at Notre Dame University , Notre Dame, Indiana US. Unsatisfied, he went to New York Institute of Photography in New York City, New York US, and invited his mother to join him as his assistant - she agreed. He become a photographer for Newsweek magazine. During World War II he was a correspondent photographer and covered numerous invasions and combat missions. He was badly wounded taking photographs of US soldiers during a Japanese mortar attack in which he refused to protect himself, hoping to get authentic images of war and spent a year recuperating, although his left hand was severely crippled the rest of his life, making it difficult for him to handle his cameras. He joined Life magazine in 1947, but after a series of differences over the way his many successful pictures were used, he resigned in 1955 to join the international photographic agency Magnum Photography Agency . William Eugene Smith personified the concerned photographer, one for whom the medium was more a means of expressing his own fears and misgivings about the world than of simply creating effective images.

He was invariably extremely involved with his subject and often spent periods of a year or more working on a particular story. His final assignment, typical of his anguish and concern over man's inhumanity to man, was a series of pictures taken over three years on the effects of industrial waste on the life of a small fishing community of Japan. More than 100,000 people had eaten poisoned fish, and more then 10,000 people had gotten ill, a story still in the news 30 years later. The third year, 1974, he received support money from various sources, including doing TV commercials for Minolta Camera, Japan. His involvement led to him being badly beaten up by men from the chemical company as the men attacked a group of demonstrators of which he was a participating photographer. He never fully recovered. After returning to America, be gave up photojournalism and devoted the rest of his life to photography through lecturing and exhibiting. Not only was he one of the great masters of the picture story, but his pictures individually combine the harsh imagery of the documentary approach with the rich, brooding quality that characterizes his finely made prints. Fred W.

McDarrah Portrait of William Eugene Smith April 8, 1975 William Eugene Smith added 2 new photos to the album: Spanish Village 1951 . · July 10, 2016 · From "Spanish Village" photo-essay. Originally published in the April 9, 1951, issue of LIFE magazine, W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay, “Spanish Village,” has been lauded for more than six decades as the most moving photographic portrait ever made of daily life in rural Spain during the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But, as the years have passed, the most chilling image from the piece—the closed, hard faces of three members of Franco’s feared Guardia Civil—has been exalted... to a point where the essays’ other masterful, evocative pictures have been largely forgotten. For countless people around the world, including photography buffs who really ought to know better, Smith’s Guardia Civil photograph is the “Spanish Village” essay. Here, LIFE.com presents “Spanish Village” in its entirety.

Even as the faces in the essay’s most famous picture evince the cruelty and arrogance often assumed by small men granted great power over others, other photographs illuminate the timeless rhythms of a small, isolated Spanish town of the last century, about which LIFE wrote: “It lives in ancient poverty and faith.” In the 1951 article that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers: The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful,” which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times. Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town.

Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries . . . and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs. [A] small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty—a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end. William Eugene Smith added 2 new photos to the album: Docteur Albert Schweitzer, USA 1949, Gabon 1954 . · July 7, 2016 · Dr.

Albert Schweitzer, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, was a pastor, a theologist, a doctor, an organist and a musicologist. These photographs were taken by W. Eugene Smith in 1954 at his hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa. Having decided to go to Africa as a medical missionary rather than as a pastor, Schweitzer in 1905 began the study of medicine at the University of Strasbourg. In 1913, having obtained his M.D. degree, he founded the hospital at Lam...baréné. In 1917 he and his wife were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. Schweitzer returned to Lambaréné in 1924 and, except for relatively short periods of time, spent the remainder of his life there. With the funds earned from his own royalties and personal appearance fees, and with those donated from all parts of the world, he expanded the hospital to seventy buildings which by the early 1960's could take care of over 500 patients in residence at any one time.

At Lambaréné, Schweitzer was doctor and surgeon in the hospital, pastor of a congregation, administrator of a village, superintendent of buildings and grounds, writer of scholarly books, commentator on contemporary history, musician, and host to countless visitors. The honors he received were numerous, including the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt and honorary doctorates from many universities emphasizing one or another of his achievements. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1952, having been withheld in that year, was given to him on December 10, 1953. With the $33,000 prize money, he started the leprosarium at Lambaréné. Albert Schweitzer died on September 4, 1965, and was buried at Lambaréné. William Eugene Smith added 2 new photos to the album: Spanish Village 1951 . · July 3, 2016 · From "Spanish Village" photo-essay. Originally published in the April 9, 1951, issue of LIFE magazine, W.

Eugene Smith’s photo essay, “Spanish Village,” has been lauded for more than six decades as the most moving photographic portrait ever made of daily life in rural Spain during the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But, as the years have passed, the most chilling image from the piece—the closed, hard faces of three members of Franco’s feared Guardia Civil—has been exalted... to a point where the essays’ other masterful, evocative pictures have been largely forgotten. For countless people around the world, including photography buffs who really ought to know better, Smith’s Guardia Civil photograph is the “Spanish Village” essay. Here, LIFE.com presents “Spanish Village” in its entirety.

Even as the faces in the essay’s most famous picture evince the cruelty and arrogance often assumed by small men granted great power over others, other photographs illuminate the timeless rhythms of a small, isolated Spanish town of the last century, about which LIFE wrote: “It lives in ancient poverty and faith.” In the 1951 article that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers: The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful,” which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times. Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town.

Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries . . . and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs. [A] small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty—a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end. William Eugene Smith | International Photography Hall of Fame 1918-1978 About William Eugene Smith was born on December 30, 1918, in Wichita, Kansas and was introduced to photography by his mother, who was an enthusiastic amateur.

His childhood was “typical” until his father committed suicide during Smith’s senior year in high school. His camera quickly became an obsession, perhaps to help Smith cope with his tragic loss. Although young, his photography talent was soon evident, and he was hired by the local newspaper to photograph sports, aviation and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Smith’s talent led to a special scholarship designed specifically for him to study photography at Notre Dame, but he left after his first semester. His restlessness took him to New York, where he was hired by Newsweek. Eventually, he worked for Life and freelanced for periodicals including Colliers, American, The New York Times and Harper’s Bazaar. During this time he married and had two children. While working for Life, Smith was assigned as a war correspondent and became legendary for his emotionally charged and truthful images. It was important to Smith to photograph the war with heart and preciseness. He photographed 26 carrier combat missions and 13 invasions in the Pacific and in Europe, on land, sea and in the air. His images were even published in Japanese magazines. His work was interrupted in 1945, May 22, during the invasion of Okinawa.

His face and hands were severely injured by a grenade. After two painful years of numerous surgeries and recovery, Smith could barely hold a camera but felt a growing need and desire to make images that were signs of hope and happiness and socially conscious. “ The day I again tried for the first time to make a photograph, I could barely load the roll of film into the camera. Yet I was determined that the first photograph would be a contrast to the war photographs and that it would speak an affirmation of life… “ His first photograph after his injury was of his two young children emerging from a dark wooded area. It was titled The Walk to Paradise Garden. It became one of his most famous and best-loved works, and was chosen by Edward Steichen as the final image in The Family of Man exhibit. Returning to his work, Smith went on to produce a series of provocative photographic essays including the most famous The Spanish Village, Country Doctor, and Nurse Midwife. He spent weeks immersing himself in the lives of his subjects, an approach almost unheard of at the time. Life published several of these essays, and although his photojournalistic methods were cutting-edge and brilliant, he had a difficult time with editors.

Smith refused to allow any photographs and their layout to be anything but his own personal vision. He resigned from Life magazine and joined Magnum, which supported and fought for photojournalistic rights. After Smith left Life, he continued to produce photo essays, supported by three Guggenheim fellowship grants. One of the largest photographic essays that he produced was of the city of Pittsburgh. He moved to Pittsburgh where he threw himself, obsessively, into the project. Smith took more than 11,000 photographs, but was physically, mentally and financially broke after the project. The images were never published and caused turmoil with Magnum and Smith’s family. He left Magnum and his family and moved to New York where he produced a series of images from his window. A more successful photographic essay was Minimata. In 1971 Smith married Aileen Mioka Sprague and began his feverous project on Minimata, a small fishing village in Japan. The water in the village had been poisoned with mercury because of industrialization. An entire generation of people were born with horrible defects. By this time Smith was the recipient of numerous awards and traveled extensively to teach and lecture.

He moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1977 to teach at the University of Arizona and organize his archive at the Center for Creative Photography. On October 15, 1978, Smith suffered a fatal stroke. W. Eugene Smith was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1984 and his honorary panel is sponsored by Rangefinder Magazine. He was inducted for his revolutionary photojournalism and setting the standard for the photo essay. Hal Gould said, “W. Eugene Smith was famous at twenty and a legend at forty. During the 1940s and 50s, when the leading edge of creative photography was found in photojournalism, Smith’s deeply humanistic style of photographic reportage continually restructured and expanded the expressive possibilities of the photo essay to a major credit level.” The Center for Creative Photography in Arizona holds the largest collection of W. Eugene Smith, which includes 3,000 master prints, thousands of negatives, contact sheets, proof and study prints, book dummies, magazine layouts, letters, cameras, darkroom equipment and records. The Smith family has founded the W.

Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, a grant-giving organization recognizing photographers who demonstrate a commitment to humanitarian photography. “…I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, and above all honesty with myself….” By Lori Oden For IPHF JOIN OUR MISSION Sign up for our newsletter * W. Eugene Smith – A Complicated Life – The Gallery of Photographic History Rob Cook Note: This is a paper I wrote for a photo history class I took at Utah State University. It is with Eugene Smith and this class that my interest in and love for photographic history was born. “Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them, can lure our senses to awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought. Someone – or perhaps many – among us head to reason, to find a way to right that which is wrong, and may even search for a cure to an illness.

the rest of us may even fell a greater sense of understanding and compassion for those whose lives are alien to our own. Photography is a small voice. I believe in it. If it is well conceived it sometimes works.” William Eugene Smith was born on December 30, 1918, in Wichita, Kansas. His mother was a photographer and his father was a businessman working in the Wichita area. Smith’s work in photography began at age 14 photographing airplanes at the airport in Wichita. Photography soon became his main interest. He was given early encouragement and advice from Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Frank Noel. At age 18 Smith started working for the Wichita Eagle and Beacon, local newspapers in Wichita. While working for these newspapers Smith started photographing the environmental devastation during the dust bowl. About his early work Smith said, “The dust bowl photography, as people called it, matured me very early in life. I was really photographing the destruction of my own family as well as the destruction of an entire area.” Smith later burned all of his early images because they were inadequate in describing what he felt as he watched the destruction.

Smith later wrote: “I had an intuitive sense of timing, an impossibly poor technique, an excitement to the fact of the event rather then of interpretive insight. Although I was deeply moved I did not have the power to communicate it.” Being able to express his feelings, for Smith, was very important, It gave nobility to his photographs of ordinary things. In 1936 Smith’s father committed suicide and the sensational­ism of the local newspaper’s coverage of his death caused Smith to bitterly hate dishonest journalism. Smith almost decided to quit journalism, but a friend convinced him that, “honesty is not of a profession, but within the individual and what he brings to his work.” At age 19 Smith began his studies at Notre Dame University on a special scholarship created for him. After one semester Smith left school and moved to New York City and began working for Newsweek Magazine. Smith was fired from Newsweek for using a small format camera. About his work at Newsweek Smith said, “It was lucky that they fired me because then I started working for Life.” Smith spent three years at Life doing ordinary mundane assignments. During this time Smith discovered the world of music.

Smith started a record collection that in time grew to over 25,000 records. Smith once said, “I learned much more from music, literature, the stag e, and the other arts, then I ever learned from photography . . . . I picked up timing and a sense of drama, and also how to relate pictures together.” During this time Smith was married to Carmen Martinez and a year later they had their first child, Marissa. In 1942 Smith resigned his contract with Life Magazine and free-lanced in the New York area for awhile. During this time Smith was injured while shooting an assignment for Parade Magazine. About this time Smith became interested in World War II, but his injury left Smith physically disqualified from service in the war. Smith applied for service in Edward Stiechen’s Naval Photographic unit but was turned down three times for physical reasons. Smith then joined the staff of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company and was assigned to the aircraft carriers Independence and Bunker Hill. During this time Smith photographed battles on Wake Island, Rabual, Tarawa, Naru Island, Kavieng, and the Mariana Islands. Smith then returned home to New York for leave and resigned his contract with Ziff-Davis.

Smith again joined the staff of Life magazine in May 1944, and returned to the Pacific to continue his work. During his work for Life Smith photographed the invasions of Saipan, Guam, and Okinawa. On Okinawa Smith was severely wounded in the head, chest, and back by shell fire. He was evacuated to Guam and in June returned to New York to continue his recovery. Smith later said of his work in the Pacific: “I would that 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.” Smith had an idealistic hope that some how his photographs would help prevent future wars. After two years of medical treatment and painful recovery Smith exposed his first negative.

It was an image of his two children walking through a garden, called “The Walk to Paradise Garden.” About this image that concluded Edward Steichens “The Family of Man” exhibition, Smith wrote: “The children in the photograph are my children, and on the day I made this photographic effort, I was not sure I would be capable of ever photographing again . . . . But now this day I would endeavor to refute two years of negation. On this day, for the first time since my injuries, I would try again to make the camera work for me. I would try to force my body to control the mechanics of the camera; and, as well, I would try to command my creative spirit out of exile. “Urgently, something compelled that this first photograph must not be a failure – pray God that I could so much as physically force a roll of film into the camera! I was determined that this first pho­tograph must sing of more than being a technical accomplish­ment. I was determined that it would speak of a gentle moment of spirited purity in contrast to the depraved savagery I had raged against with my war photographs – my last photographs.

I was almost desperate in this determination, in my insistence that for some reason this first exposure must have a special quality. I have never quite understood why it had to be thus, why it had to be the first and not the second; why, if not accomplished today, it could not be accomplished the next week; yet that day I challenged myself to do it, against my nerves, against my reason . . . . What ever the reason, probably more complex then one – I felt, without labeling it as such, that it was to be a day of spiritual decision . . . . “Still, and regardless of the conflict that raged within me, there was no change in my determination, and of my intentions for that first photograph. These woods with these children prancing in through them in happiness . . . as against war photographs I had made of a terrified mother and her child wheeling in bewilderment behind a shell broken tree . . . . ” In 1947 Smith returned to Life Magazine, and had to prove his ability to photograph again. Between the years of 1947 – 1957 Smith photographed many photo essays for Life.

These included, “Folk Singers” (1947), “Trial by Jury” (1948), “Country Doctor” (1948), “Hard Times on Broadway” (1949), “Life Without Germs” (1949), “Recording Artist” (1951), “Spanish Village” (1951), “Nurse Mid­wife” (1951), “Chaplin at Work” (1952), “The Reign of Chemistry” (1953), “My Daughter Juanita” (1953), and “A Man of Mercy” (1954). Among these photo essays is some of Smith’s most influential and important work. When talking about Smith’s desire to somehow change the world through his work, three of these essays stand above the rest – “Country Doctor”, “Spanish Village”, and “Nurse Midwife”. Through these series of photographs Smith gained even greater fame and was able to raise the conscious level of the world. The “Spanish Village” essay showed Smiths hatred for un-fair rule.

Smith went to Spain to “try and show what living is like under the heel and police of a dictator.” Talking about the death scene in the “Spanish Village” essay Smith said: “In the death scene in the “Spanish Village,” I did not want to intrude into the morning scene. But as the picture came about, the day before I had been quite ill with an upset stomach in the field just at the edge of the village. A man offered me some wine, which I didn’t want but I drank it anyway just because of the gesture of kindness. Then the next day he came to me and said his father had died that night. He had gangrene and they wanted to bury him as quickly as possible, so he asked me if I could take him to the county seat so he could get the necessary papers registered. When we came back, he went to his house. I could see into the house, it was a very moving scene that was happening in the back of the room, but I could not bring myself to go in, just walk in; I just couldn’t do it. I paced back and forth outside storming at myself because I knew it was an important picture, and it was important to the whole story.

But yet I did not feel I had the right to intrude, and I knew that a great number of photographers would have just gone in. Whether they would have come out with a great picture I don’t know, because they probably would have disturbed the people in there. Well, I stayed outside for awhile. Then I saw the son of the man come to the door, and I suddenly went up to him and said, ‘sir, I do not wish to dishonor your father, but would it be permissible for me to enter your house and to photograph?’ and he said, ‘please come in, I would be honored.’ So I went in with one assistant. The only light in there was a candle about three feet over his head, and with all that black they were wearing, it was very difficult. But I wanted to hold the same mood of lighting, so it was one of the few times I used a flashbulb. I took the reflector off and just used the bare bulb. By hand signals alone I motioned my assistant to work his way around behind the people to a position where he could hold the bulb over the candle so that it would simulate the candle lighting.

I made one exposure and immediately realized that it was not good, that the picture was all out of rhythm. I made one more and thought I had at least a good picture. I would have loved to have stayed there and photographed a couple of rolls, but then I saw the son standing in the doorway peering in. I again motioned without words for my assistant to go through the other doorway so that the mourners in the other room and the son in the doorway could be seen, made one more exposure, and then very reluctantly I left. All this time never having said a word, hoping I never created much of a disturbance.” In 1955 Smith once again resigned from Life magazine because of a dispute over the “A Man of Mercy” essay. About Life magazine Smith wrote, ” My attitude was almost always friendly towards Life; in spite of all their faults and failures they were a great magazine; otherwise it would not have been worth the fight. The resignation over the Schweitzer essay – it was a battle over the right of responsibility for my reportage, I was never bluntly saying they could never run a story of mine and distort it, and I resigned trying to force them to work out the problems about the story . . . .

All the resignations were for the purposes of trying to help me gain the quality in the magazine I felt was my responsibility as a journalist. And I take that responsibility very seriously.’ After his second resignation from Life, Smith joined Magnum Photos. While employed with Magnum Photos Smith began his most ambitious essay. It was a photo study of the city of Pitts­burgh. Photo historian William S Johnson, wrote about the Pittsburgh essay: Feeling that he must vindicate himself, and driven by the desire to prove his ideas about the full possibilities of the photographic essay, Smith turned a simple project to do some illustrations for a book about Pittsburgh into a huge three-year-long project. 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 personally financed the project in the beginning but later received two grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to help him finish it. About this time Smith began his first major work in color.

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.” By the end of the 1950s Smith’s reputation was higher then ever, but his family life was in chaos. In 1957 Smith divorced his wife and moved into a loft on Sixth Avenue in New York City. During the next several years Smith photographed the seasonal changes and events that happened outside his window. Out of this work came his “As From My Window I Sometimes Glance”, and “The Loft From Inside In” essays. In 1959, part of the “As From My Window I Sometimes Glance” essay was published in Life Magazine under the name “Drama Beneath a City Window” was selected by the United States Information Agency for publication and distribution to Russia. Without Smith’s knowledge or consent the U.S.I.A. airbrushed out a police car that was in one of the photographs. During this time Smith was recognized as one of the worlds 10 greatest photographers by an international poll conducted by Popular Photography Magazine.

Also about this time Smith began an essay on a Haitian Mental Clinic. The essay was finished, but never published in its entirety. In 1958 Smith began work on a book that would cover his life’s work. The book was titled “The Walk To Paradise Garden”. About this book Smith said, “This is a statement of my philosophies and dis­criminations . . . letting truth be my prejudice . . . dedicated to those not taking the past in proof against the future.” The dummy for the book was finished in 1961. In the early 1960s Smith exhibited his work all over the country and began teaching private classes in photojournalism. In 1961 Smith was commissioned by the Japanese manufac­turing company, Hitachi Limited, to photograph its operations. Over the next year Smith had several portfolios published in Japanese magazines. Smith also worked on a book that Hitachi was to produce. In 1962 Smith returned to New York. During 1963 – 1964 Smith published an essay in Life Magazine on his work done for Hitachi called “Colossus of the Orient”.

The book produced by Hitachi was also published under the title, “A Chapter of Image.” In 1964 Smith was appointed to the Presidents Committee on Photography. In 1965 Smith worked on the development of the magazine Sensorium with Carol Thomas, his assistant over the past seven years. The project was later unpublished because of lack of financial backing. 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 and his new Japanese/American wife, Aileen, moved back to Japan to begin his final and probably greatest work, “Minamata”. Smith and his wife moved to a small Japanese fishing village called Minamata. The people of the village were suffering from a strange disease later named, Minamata disease. This disease was proved to be coming from a local chemical company who was dumping mercury into the bay by the village.

Smith and his wife spent four years in the village documenting the struggle by the disease victims to gain compensation from the chemical company for their destroyed lives. Smith and his wife, who was also a photographer, created many articles, essays, and traveling exhibitions that showed the struggle of the victims. In 1975 Smith and his wife published the book, Minamata . An overview of their work in Minamata. This book had a world – wide impact on the public awareness of this disease and pollution. During the coverage of a press conference dealing with the disease Smith was beat up by the chemical company’s guards and severely injured. This only helped to gain even more sympathy for the victims of the disease. Of the many photographs shot in Minamata, one special photograph of a mother and her child became the symbolic photograph of their work. It also has become one of Smith’s best known images. This photograph has been called the Pieta of the 20th Century. Shelly Rice in her article “W. Eugene Smith, A Dream of Life” wrote about this photograph: “The only light shines on the mother and the child, whose deformed body is stretched horizontally as she lies, helpless in the tub.

Yet in spite of Tomoko’s malformed limbs, in spite of the problems her condition has caused, her mother, seated vertically, holds her gently, intimately, as she looks at her with maternal tenderness. Life may have delt these two women an excruciatingly bad hand, and government and Chisso officials may have treated them with neglect and abuse, but the emotional bonds that link Tomoko and her mother, and their courage to live and love, have survived intact.” Smith also wrote about the photograph: “As we photographed other things, things around her, and even the family, it grew in my mind that to me the symbol of Minamata was, finally, a picture of this woman and the child, Tomoko. One day I simply said to Aileen that if every thing is all right up there, and they are not too busy, let us try and make that symbolic picture. Now this does not in any way mean that I was posing the picture in the sense of posing a picture. It meant that I was interpreting what by now I knew full well to be true, because I would never have done it otherwise.

So we went there and sat; and we talked for awhile; and, I actually explained what kind of a picture – I didn’t explain that I wanted that look, that look of courage – I simply said that I wanted something of the caring for Tomoko. I thought maybe away from the bath would be the picture that would best show what had happened to Tomoko’s body. We started, the mother herself suggested that the photograph should be in the bath; so we decided to try that. The mother went through her ordinary bath routine with the child, and this was the result.” After Minamata, Smith and his wife, Aileen divorced, and Smith returned to New York to begin two years of promotional appearances. In 1977 Smith went to Tucson and began to teach photography at the University of Arizona, Still feeling the effects of his beating at Minamata, and a life of drug and alcohol abuse, Smith suffered a severe stroke. This began a year of painful recovery. During this time Smith began to organize his life’s work and planning his auto-biography. In the fall of 1978 Smith suffered a second stroke and died. W.

Eugene Smith’s philosophy about photography is best said by letting him say it. “I put so much passion and so much energy into the doing of my photographs that beyond photography for art’s sake, ‘art for art’s sake,’ or such, I much prefer to have my photographs add this other element, that possibly they will stir someone to action, to do something about something. I would like to make clear at the very beginning that I have no conflict between journalism and my artist self. At one time I did, but then I realized to be a good journalist I needed to be the finest artist I could possibly be. “As far as I am concerned, I just very quietly accept photogra­phy as an art. Some of the photographs I have taken have changed others’ lives, too, because I know from the history of my own work that at times through photographs I have been able to destroy a concentration camp; I have been able to build a clinic for a nurse midwife; I have in some measure been able to help a little fighting the disease of pollution and racism. “I don’t feel all that dedicated.

I just feel like a normal guy that too many people insist upon becoming a legend, but I feel humble and always on the threshold of knowing how to do my work.” The reason I wanted to do this paper on W. Eugene Smith is because he is probably the photographer who has influenced me and my work the most. While studying Smith’s life and philosophy about photography I realized that photography has an unseen power beyond recording an event and freezing life. Photography has the power to destroy as well as build the photographer. Smith was so dedicated to his work that photography, in a way, destroyed his life. When Smith died in 1978, he died like many other creative people. He died alone and without much money. During most of Smith’s life he abused drugs and alcohol. Smith never denied the fact that he had these problems, but he always believed that they didn’t effect his performance behind the camera. When I look at Smith’s work I don’t see a man who hated the world and tried to escape from it by drinking and taking drugs. I see a man who hated the values of the world and tried to correct them. I think Smith understood people, but didn’t understand how he as a person fit into the world.

Smith looked at himself as the defender of truth for the world. Smith’s essay on the nurse midwife, Maude Callen, is a great example of his desire to change the world. At a time when it wasn’t socially acceptable to deal with blacks, Smith went to North Carolina and spent weeks getting to know this woman and became her friend. I think that Smith gained this woman’s trust and respect. His photographs show it. Through Smith’s photographs published in Life , $18,500 was donated by Life’s readers toward building a clinic for this woman. This same scenario was repeated many times and with many different situations all over the world. Smith’s photographs have a special quality that draw people to them. Technically I don’t think Smith was any better then other photographers of the time, but one quality that set Smith apart was his use of light and the quality of light that he consistently had in his photographs. Smith was a master of light and the electronic flash. One very good example of Smiths use of light, is his photograph of the Spanish Civil Guards in his “Spanish Village” essay. Smith hated these men, who to him represented everything that was bad in the world.

One day they asked Smith to photograph them for his story, so he placed them facing into the sun so they would have to squint. The quality of the noon day sun gave the guards a harsh, evil look. Smith told the guards that the light made them look better. There are two of Smith’s photographs that I enjoy the most. They cover an emotional range from good to bad. The first is a photograph of a mental patient in Haiti. The photograph shows just the head of a black mental patient against a black background. The patient’s white eyes jump out at you. The expression on the man’s face is that of a man in great pain. Smith’s use of hard contrasting light and the expression on the mans face helps one viewing the image to better understand the empty world of this man. The second photograph is of a nun waiting for the survivors of the Andrea Doria. There is nothing exceptional about the photograph itself, but to me this is the W. Eugene Smith image I enjoy the most. This picture is simply of a young nun against a dark background, but the striking quality of this photograph is not formed by dramatic lighting or incredible action. It is the expression on the nun’s face.

It is an expression of concern and hope, but most of all it is a look of great faith in God. This to me is why I admire Smith’s work. He had the ability to evoke great expression from those he photographed. The photograph of the spinner from the “Spanish Village” essay has that Smithian quality of great expression. The image of Tomoko in the bath with her mother from the Minamata essay is another example of the expression Smith was able to see in his subjects. The expression of love on this mother’s face is striking. W. Eugene Smith was surrounded all his life by people who cared for him and loved him. He spent his whole life trying to make the world a better place for others. After studying Smith’s life it is ironic to me that when Smith died, he died alone, apart from his family and doing something he probably didn’t enjoy as much as photographing-teaching. In a way photography destroyed itself and Smith. Smith’s ashes were buried in upstate New York. Present at his funeral were his second wife, Aileen, all his children, his first wife, Carmen, and most of his 13 grandchildren.

After Smith’s death a cable came signed by three men in Minamata: WE COME UPON THE UNEXPECTED NEWS OF YOUR DEATH AND PRO­FOUNDLY CANNOT ENDURE OUR GRIEF. YOUR HISTORY IS OUR COURAGE ITSELF. WE PLEDGE OUR INHERITANCE OF THE MIGHTY FOOTSTEPS YOU LEFT BEHIND IN MINAMATA. Bibliography 1- W. Eugene Smith, Aileen Smith, Minamata, Publ. by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York, © 1975. 2- William S Johnson, W. Eugene Smith, Publ. by Pantheon Books © 1986, Translated from French. 3- Kenneth Kobre, Photojournalism The Professionals Approach, Publ. by Focal Press, Butterworth Publishers, Boston, © 1980, Pgs. 282 – 305. 4- Time – Life Books, Great Photographers 1983, Publ. by Time – Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, © 1983, Pg. 176.

5- Parry Janis, Wendy MacNeel, Photography Within the humanities, Publ. by Addison House, Danbury N. H., © 1977, Pgs. 96 – 109. 6- Aperture, W. Eugene Smith, Publ. by Aperture Inc., New York, © 1969. 7- Shelly Rice, W. Eugene Smith: A Dream of Life, Publ by Lens on Campus Magazine, part one, March 1986, Hearst Business Communica tions, Inc., Garden City, New York, Pgs 14 – 17. 8- Shelly Rice, W. Eugene Smith: A Dream of Life, Publ by Lens on Campus Magazine, part two, April 1986, Hearst Business Communica tions, Inc., Garden City, New York, Pgs 10 – 13. 9- Aperture, Let Truth be Prejudice, Publ. by Aperture Inc., New York, © 1987.

Share this: I have copy and pasted from your awesome article into my blog… if you have any objections whatsoever I will remove immediately… I have credited and given full reference to you and your site… William Eugene Smith is amazing… this is how I want my pictures to be! I doubt you will get too many “hits” from my site as I do this mostly just as a hobby and do not have a following… however, I felt it important to give credit where it’s due!

Question: What was the profession of William Eugene Smith?
Answer: Photographer