Having graduated from high school in 1936 at the age of eighteen, he took his first job(s) working for local newspapers. He quickly progressed through the ranks and very soon found himself working in New York City working for Newsweek, a weekly magazine which had been going for around three years. It is well documented that Smith, although a consummate professional, was a particularly difficult person to get along with. This is highlighted by his sacking from Newsweek within a couple of years, for his refusal to use a medium format camera (A camera which provides a negative which is larger than that of a 35mm camera, but smaller than the older ‘Large Format camera’s). In short, he knew that he could go and work for ‘LIFE’ magazine and they would allow him to use a 35mm camera. This was typical of Smith’s uncompromising character, you might also call it his supreme confidence in his own ability and unwavering feel for what was right. Smith was fast becoming seen as the ‘Gold Standard’ setter. Smith was well established at ‘LIFE’ and was in a position that most photographers would sacrifice almost anything for, yet after only five years, he turned his back on it all as a matter of principle. ‘LIFE’, it would seem, had used his images of Albert Schweitzer in a way that he did not consider appropriate. It was later revealed that one of the images had been heavily manipulated.
A man of Smith’s talent was never going to be idle for long. In 1955 Smith went to work for Magnum Photo Agency. It was with Magnum that Smith created three monumental tomes of work (two physical and one, Minamata, a humanitarian giant).
When asked by Magnum Photo Agency to carry out what should have been a 3 week assignment documenting the city of Pittsburgh, he took it on and it was a project that was to take him 3 years and 11,000 photo’s to complete. Such were the standards and level of excellence that he set himself; he considered this assignment a failure. This would pale into insignificance against his next project. He stumbled into this next project quite by accident, when, in 1957 he moved into an apartment already occupied by a couple of jazz musicians. Smith must have caught the bug, as, over the next seven years, he took over 40,000 images and made in excess of 4,000 hours of audio recordings. The recordings covered anything and everything to do with jazz, whether it was live music, radio programs or even casual conversations. Smith’s contribution to the music world alone is incalculable.
Smith visited Japan three times in his life, and it was here that possibly his most iconic images were produced. His first ‘visit’ was as a war correspondent, where, in 1945 he was hit and severely injured by a Japanese mortar shell. It badly damaged his left hand and continued through, hitting him in the face, badly impairing his vision. It took him two years to fully recover from this; such was the damage he suffered.
From 1971-1973 Smith (and his Japanese wife Aileen) lived in an industrial town called Minamata, where a humanitarian disaster was unfolding (had been before his arrival) in front of him. It was known that the Chisso Company ( A well known chemical company that made and supplied liquid crystals to be used in LCD’s) had, for approximately thirty years been depositing water, contaminated with such chemicals as the highly toxic methylmercury into the river on which Minamata was built and relied upon. The effects of contamination on humankind were many and appalling in many cases resulting in degrees of blindness, muscular and skeletal deformation, “severe cases presented with insanity, paralysis, coma and then death within weeks of the onset of symptoms”3. Finally in 2004 the government ordered the Chisso Company to clean up its contamination, not before having been ordered to pay out millions in compensation.
This poignant image entitled “Tomoko Uemura in her bath”4 is Smith’s most famous image of the whole saga. It was this image that eventually made the rest of the world aware of what had been happening for nearly forty years. It was later removed from publication upon request of the family, and many years later, re-published. Unbelievably, it was to take another thirty years for justice to start to be done.
“The walk to Paradise Garden”6 was taken in 1946 and is a photograph of his own two children, taken whilst convalescing after his injuries sustained in Okinawa 1945. This is arguably his most famous photograph.
Reference material
- Smith, W. (1948). Country doctor. Chicago: Time Inc.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Eugene_Smith
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisso
- Smith, W. and Smith, A. (1975). Minamata. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
- https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smith-photographer-record-everything
- Smith, W. (2017). The walk to paradise garden. [image].
I see! 