W. Eugene Smith
Born Wichita, KS, 30 Dec 1918; died Tucson, AZ, 15 Oct 1978.
American photographer. He studied photography briefly at the University of Notre Dame, IN, in 1936–7. He began working as a freelance press photographer in 1935, and he rose to prominence as one of the great photojournalists on the staff of Life magazine during World War II. While working as a war correspondent in the Pacific in 1943–4 he damaged his left hand, which almost forced him to abandon photography, but he returned to Life from 1946. He became President of the Photo league in 1949. He created thousands of intimate and profound images, forging new standards of excellence in photographic documentary series, but only a few were included for publication; this lack of final control over his pictures was a source of great difficulty for him and forced his resignation from Life in 1954. He then worked as a freelance photojournalist, but his high sense of moral purpose and historical awareness created a lifelong conflict between the desire to present the whole photo-essay and the necessities of editorial contraction.
The essence of Smith’s work was his ability to focus on a particular human condition with such sympathy that the work expressed universal qualities to the point of affecting the viewer’s perception of history. He found a personal mission in exposing social ills by identifying himself emotionally with the lives of the people he photographed (see ). When on assignment in Spain (for the essay ‘Spanish Village’, Life, 9 April 1951), for example, he lived for a year with the impoverished villagers whose lives he was recording. Smith habitually photographed using a high aperture setting (f stop), which increases the depth of field in the image, and he was not averse to restaging events for a more dramatic composition or psychologically compelling moment. He processed his own prints with the same care he had brought to the original exposures.
Others among the most acclaimed of Smith’s more than 50 photo-essays are ‘Country Doctor’ (Life, 20 Sept 1948), ‘Nurse Midwife’ (3 Dec 1951) and the series ‘Schweitzer’ (15 Nov 1954). The essay ‘Minamata’ (2 June 1972) epitomizes the quality of his craftsmanship and commentary on social issues. One photograph in particular stands out as a summation of his life’s work: Tomoko in her Bath, which shows in strong chiaroscuro the beatific face of a mother bathing her 15-year-old daughter, a tragic victim of mercury poisoning caused by the pollution of Japanese fishing waters. After his death the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was established with 63 trustees and advisers from 15 countries, in order to give an annual award to the photographer whose work reflects the same essential social awareness and sensitivity.
Retrieved from Oxford Art Online; http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T079350?q=W.+Eugene+Smith&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (Accessed Feb. 16, 2012)
See also, "W. Eugene Smith." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Vol. 19. Detroit: Gale, 1999. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.
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