W. Eugene Smith

 Unable to sleep one night recently I chose to re-read a 1969 Aperture Monograph about Gene Smith's photography. At the time of that publication, Minor White was still the Aperture Editor and Smith was still seven years from his death at age 67. I was then in my thirties  and actively interested in doing photography, but I don't recall a specific awareness of Smith's importance at that time. And yet, I think of him now as having had a formative influence on how I came to think about photography's importance as an art form.

In spite of that perceptual vacuum on my part, I think the weight of Smith's innovation in developing the photo essay form was inescapable. The graphic power, the intimacy and story-telling depth of his picture essays in the major magazines was unprecedented. In part, his stylistic originality owed something to the times; he began serious work toward the end of the Great Depression, and then dove into a vertiginous career as a chronicler of World War II.

 As a war correspondent Smith worked close to the action with the Marines during the invasions of Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In that last island battle he was severely wounded and was unable to work during a painful two-year recovery.

Back in photography Smith worked intermittently for the major magazines and also for a time as a member of the Magnum Photos agency.  Smith's post war photography focused seldom on extremes of violence and more on daily life events.  In fact, one of the first pictures he made on regaining enough strength to hold a camera was the famous picture of his two children that appeared in the Family of Man exhibit, The Walk to Paradise Garden.

In spite of the wide recognition of the quality and innovation of Smith's photography during his lifetime, he came to regard much of the war-time work as a failure. That was likely due in part to Smith's setting of standards for himself that  were practically unattainable; he wanted the pictures to contribute substantially to the eradication of war.  Smith's objectives and standards were also not consistent with the realities of publishing in the major news magazines for which he worked.  Editors of the big picture-using publications like Life and Time insisted on pre-scripting story lines, and they never used the photographs in the quantities and manner in which Smith would have done had he enjoyed significant editorial control.
 
On giving further thought to my initial awareness of Smith's work I think it likely was connected to  his photo essay about mercury poisoning through environmental contamination by the Chisso factory around the Japanese fishing village of Minamata. That effort probably produced the most direct change in opinions and behavior of any photographic work accomplished by Smith; it was undertaken with the considerable assistance of the woman he married upon arrival in Minamata in 1971, Aileen Sprague.

Aileen and Gene, credit/copyright: Ishikawa Takeshi

The most impactful of the photographs included in the book produced by Smith and Sprague, Minamata, Words and Photographs,  portrayed a mother cradling her severely deformed daughter in a traditional Japanese bath house.  Ironically, long after Smith's death, Aileen in 1997 withdrew the photo from circulation in accordance with Tomoko's parents' wishes.

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Update:

Thanks to the suggestion of JR Smith I looked around the web for more insights about Gene Smith.  I did not find the video JR had mentioned, but I did come across an interview with James Karales who was a darkroom assitant during the time Smith was working on the Pittsburgh project.