Background
William Eugene Smith was born on December 30, 1918, in Wichita, Kansas, United States to William H. Smith and Nettie Lee.
The current Main Building of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, built after the great fire of 1879
(One of the high points of 20th-century photojournalism: t...)
One of the high points of 20th-century photojournalism: the Smith's documented the effects of mercury - discharged by a Chisso factory into the town's water and food supply - on the population and the Japanese government and Chisso's attempt to hide those effects. Photographs by W. Eugene Smith; text by Aileen M. Smith.
https://www.amazon.com/Minamata-Poisoning-People-Burden-Courage/dp/0030136318/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=W.+Eugene+Smith&qid=1601283521&sr=8-1
1975
(Let Truth Be The Prejudice documents the life and work of...)
Let Truth Be The Prejudice documents the life and work of W. Eugene Smith, a man whose work expanded the range and depth of photography, bringing new aesthetic and moral power to the photo essay.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0893811793/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3
1998
(In 1959, Smith became obsessed with creating an extended ...)
In 1959, Smith became obsessed with creating an extended photo-essay that he called "The Big Book," a complex retrospective of his work that would reflect his philosophy of art and critique of the world.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/029275468X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i2
2013
(Injured Bob Wiggs, helped by friends Chuck Phillips (L) &...)
Injured Bob Wiggs, helped by friends Chuck Phillips (L) & Wallace Reynolds (R) as he leaves country Dr. Ernest Ceriani's clinic
1948
William Eugene Smith was born on December 30, 1918, in Wichita, Kansas, United States to William H. Smith and Nettie Lee.
Growing up, William Smith had taken interest in flying and aviation. When the little boy was only nine years old and asking his mother for money to buy photographs of airplanes, the child was given his first camera. In 1927 Nettie gave him her old camera in hopes that he would begin to take his own photographs.
William Smith started grade school in his hometown of Wichita. He started Catholic school in 1924. By the time he was a teenager, photography was his passion and his craft.
William Smith began his journey as a professional and serious photographer when the famous Frank Noel of the Wichita Press approached him. Noel, impressed with his photography, pushed him to submit his works to the news sources. By the time Smith was fifteen years old he was published in The Wichita Eagle and the Wichita Beacon.
William Smith graduated from the Wichita North High School in 1936. That same year, his father committed suicide. The truth of the circumstances of the situation had been lost. It was in this series of unfortunate events that lit the flame for William to begin his career in photojournalism. He made a promise to hold himself to the highest standards of truth no matter the cost.
William Smith moved to New York City and by 1938 he had begun to work for Newsweek. He became known there for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality and eventually he was fired from Newsweek. He began to work for Life magazine in 1939, quickly building a strong relationship with then picture editor Wilson Hicks.
As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing, and then at Life, William Smith took photos on the front lines in the Pacific theater of World War II. He was with the American forces during their island-hopping offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In 1945, William Smith was seriously injured by mortar fire while photographing the Battle of Okinawa.
In 1946, William Smith took his first photograph since being injured: a picture of his two children walking in the garden of his home in Tuckahoe, New York, which he titled The Walk to Paradise Garden. The photograph became enormously famous when Edward Steichen used it as one of the key images in the exhibition The Family of Man, which Steichen curated in 1955. After spending two years undergoing surgery, William Smith continued to work at Life until 1954.
In 1950, William Smith was sent to the UK to cover the General Election, in which the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was elected with a tiny majority. Life had taken an editorial stance against the Labour government. In the end, a limited number of Smith's photographs of British working-class people were published, including three shots of the South Wales Valleys.
Between 1948 and 1954 William Smith photographed for Life magazine a series of photo essays with a humanist perspective which laid the basis of modern photojournalism.
In August 1948 William Smith photographed Dr. Ernest Ceriani in the town of Kremmling, Colorado, for several weeks, covering the doctor's arduous work in a thinly populated western environment, grappling with life and death situations.
William Smith spent a month in Spain in 1950, photographing the village of Deleitosa, Extremadura, focusing on themes of rural poverty. He attracted the suspicion of the local Guardia Civil until he finally made an abrupt exit across the border to France. A Spanish Village was published in Life on April 9, 1951, to great acclaim.
In 1951, William Smith persuaded Life editor Edward Thompson to let him do a photo-journalistic profile of Maude E. Callen, a black nurse-midwife working in rural South Carolina. For weeks he accompanied Callen on her exhausting schedule, rising before dawn and working into the evening. The essay Nurse Midwife was published in Life on December 3, 1951.
In 1954, William Smith photographed an extensive photo-essay about the work Albert Schweitzer at his clinic at Lambaréné in Gabon, West Africa. After leaving Life magazine, he joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1955. There he was commissioned by Stefan Lorant to produce a photographic profile of the city of Pittsburgh. The project was supposed to take him a month and to produce 100 images. It ended up occupying more than two years and producing 13,000 photographic negatives. The intended book was never delivered to Lorant, and Smith's obsessive work was bailed out by money from Magnum, causing strain between Smith and the photo-journalist collective.
From 1957 to 1965 William Smith took photographs and made recordings of jazz musicians playing at a Manhattan loft shared by David X. Young, Dick Cary, and Hall Overton. From 1957 to 1965, he made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,740 reel to reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district were major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music.
William Smith and his wife of Japanese origin, Aileen Mioko Smith, lived in Minamata, both a fishing village and a "one company" industrial city in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan from 1971 to 1973. There they created a long-term photo-essay on Minamata disease, the effects of mercury poisoning caused by a Chisso factory discharging heavy metals into water sources around Minamata.
In January 1972, William Smith was attacked by Chisso Company employees near Tokyo, in an attempt to stop him from further publicizing the effects of Minamata disease to the world. He survived the attack, but with limited vision in one eye. During the time he was not able to work due to his injuries, Aileen continued the work. The essay was published in 1975 as "Minamata, Words, and Photographs by W.E. Smith and A.M. Smith."
William Smith returned from his stay in Minamata, Japan, in November 1974, and, after completing the Minamata book, he moved to a studio in New York City with a new partner, Sherry Suris.
Smith's friends were alarmed by his deteriorating health and arranged for him to join the teaching faculty of the Art Department and Department of Journalism at the University of Arizona. William Smith and Suris moved to Tucson, Arizona in November 1977. On 23 December 1977, he suffered a massive stroke, but made a partial recovery and continued to teach and organize his archive. William Smith suffered a second stroke and died on October 15, 1978. He was cremated and his ashes interred in Crum Elbow Rural Cemetery, Hyde Park, New York.
(One of the high points of 20th-century photojournalism: t...)
1975(In 1959, Smith became obsessed with creating an extended ...)
2013(Let Truth Be The Prejudice documents the life and work of...)
1998Injured Bob Wiggs, helped by friends Chuck Phillips (L) & Wallace Reynolds (R) as he leaves country Dr. Ernest Ceriani's clinic
(Injured Bob Wiggs, helped by friends Chuck Phillips (L) &...)
1948A Japanese freighter in Truk Atoll is hit by a torpedo dropped by a U.S. airplane in 1944
1944Silhouetted girl on crutches walking down hospital hall
(1966-1968)
Domes of Russian style church, tops of other buildings, iron fence
(1955-1956)
Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath
1971One of Smith's photographs of a victim of Minamata disease
1971Girl and man in the audience on wooden benches
1950Maude followed by a woman, hiking through the forest
1951Dead mouse and its impression in two petri dishes
1949Boy sweeping up dung, collecting it in basket
1950
Quotes from others about the person
Summarizing Smith's achievements, Ben Maddow wrote that Smith claimed that his vocation was "to do nothing less than a record, by word and photograph, the human condition. No one could really succeed at such a job: yet Smith almost did. During his relatively brief and often painful life, he created at least fifty images so powerful that they have changed the perception of our history.
Writing in The Guardian in 2017, Sean O'Hagan described Smith as "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay."