25 September - 27 November 2011
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| Poster of the exhibition
"W. Eugene Smith – Photographs. A retrospective”
Photo: W. Eugene Smith: Steelworker, Pittsburgh, 1955
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York |
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W. EUGENE SMITH – PHOTOGRAPHS
A retrospective
25 September - 27 November 2011
Organizer
Berliner Festspiele. An exhibition of La Fabrica, Madrid
Curator Enrica Viganò
Media partners rbb Kulturradio, Der Tagesspiegel
Partner The Mandala Hotel
W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in
1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically
and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of
his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine
that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography
more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for
a greater say in the composition of a photo-essay. His painstakingly
researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of
photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s.
Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been
inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. In 1936, following
the suicide of his father as a result of the Great Crash, Smith
initially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. But he
dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he
attended the New York Institute of Photography. He embarked on his
professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.
A year later he began to work as a freelance for the Black Star Agency,
and his pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, Time and Life.
With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years.
When the USA found itself at war at the end of 1941 Smith initially took
propaganda shots for the magazine Parade to support the American
troops. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in
reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. In 1944 he was back
on the staff of Life - this time as a war correspondent - documenting
the battle of Saipan and the American landings on the islands of Iwo
Jima and Okinawa. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos
changed. Instead of being gung ho they tended to focus on the terrible
sufferings of the civilian population and were shot in a way that
involved the viewer emotionally. On 22 May 1945 Smith himself was
seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that
went on until 1947.
His new lease of life was symbolized by the first photograph he took
after his wound. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest
children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. "While I followed my
children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they
were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I
suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite
of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a
sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.” (1954)
After his recovery he went back to work for Life again. Documentary
features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly
popular with readers. In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a
young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several
weeks. His report Nurse Midwife (1951) on the black midwife Maud Callen
was produced against a background of racial discrimination and the
brazen activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. In developing
the prints Smith adjusted the lighting so as to enhance the emotional
atmosphere - during a birth, for example - and so arouse sympathy for
the selfless efforts of the midwife. His social commitment, however, did
not always meet with approval, as in the case of the unpublished report
(1950) on the re-election campaign of Clement Attlee, the candidate of
the British Labour Party. Life intended the report to strengthen
indirectly the position of the Conservatives by presenting the results
of Attlee’s nationalization policies in a critical light. Smith’s
coverage, however, aroused sympathy for Attlee’s programme and the
candidate himself. Smith had more success with his Spanish Village
feature (1951). He wanted to convey an impression of living conditions
under a fascist regime. After obtaining the necessary shooting
permission, he spent two months studying the Spanish countryside before
finally selecting a remote village in the Estremadura as his subject.
Not a few of the photographs, with their chiaroscuro and clearly
structured composition, are reminiscent of classical paintings and
convey by means of this stylistic device a sense of the hardships but
also the beauty of life there.
Smith’s feature on the work of Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné was to be
his last for Life whose refusal to give him a say in the selection and
layout of pictures had become unacceptable, and he left the periodical
after the appearance of his photo essay Albert Schweitzer – Man of Mercy
in November 1955.
A career alternative offered itself in the shape of membership of
Magnum, the photographers’ agency founded in 1947. Stefan Lorant
commissioned Smith to do an extensive feature on the city of Pittsburgh
and its iron foundries, which occupied him for the next few years and
nearly exhausted his financial and personal resources. Instead of the
100 prints agreed with Lorant, there arose 13,000 shots out of which he
wanted to compose an essay which would be entirely in line with his
convictions. In 1958 88 photographs were published in Popular
Photography’s Annual Guide, although the essay never appeared in its
entirety.
In 1957 Smith, who was known for his excessive devotion to his work, had
left his family and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue in New York. The house
was visited and used for rehearsals by many well-known jazz musicians,
and Smith, who was a passionate music lover, photographed and documented
this creative milieu over the next few years, while also keeping an
audio record on 1,740 tapes, which were only discovered among his
posthumous effects in 1998. At the same time he photographed street
scenes from his window while also working on the construction of a
psychiatric clinic in Haiti.
In 1961 a commission from the Cosmos PR Agency to photograph the company
Hitachi Ltd. took Smith to Japan for a year. This was followed in 1963
by a book which contrasted modern Japan with its deeply rooted
traditions. A decade later he again turned to the forced modernization
of Japan and its grave consequences with a shocking series about the
Minamata epidemic which had been triggered by the environmental
pollution caused by the chemical concern Chisso, which had discharged
mercurial waste into the sea near the town of Minamata. The Committee
for the Defence of the Victims hired Smith to document the human and
ecological dimensions of the catastrophe, and the photographer, who
threw himself heart and soul into the project, moved with his second
wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, to Minamata. In the course of his researches
he was beaten up by company security guards and severely injured. The
pictures he took, which appeared in Life and his book Minamata: A
Warning to the World largely contributed to publicizing the scandal.
By the early 1970s Smith’s photographic work was attracting the
attention of museums. His photo A Walk to Paradise Garden had already
been selected by Edward Steichen as a symbolic climax to the exhibition
The Family of Man (1955), but it was not until 1971 that the first
retrospective Let Truth Be the Prejudice was held in the Jewish Museum
in New York. In 1977 Smith, by this time seriously ill, moved to Tucson,
Arizona, to take up a teaching post at the university there in what was
to be the last year of his life.
Smith’s estate is archived in the Center of Creative Photography in
Tucson. Since 1980, in recognition of his support of good causes, the
International Center of Photography, New York, has awarded grants from
the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund.
www.gropiusbau.de
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