A book review I wrote for CNN.com in 1999. One of the best photo-books I’ve ever seen, but it’s a lot more than that.
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‘W. Eugene Smith, Photographs, 1934-1975’
Unforgettable book combines art, artifact
(CNN) — “My station in life is to capture the action of life; the life of the world, its humor, its tragedy. In other words, life as it is. A true picture, unposed and real.”
These words, written by photographer Eugene Smith in a letter to his mother in 1936, represent both the high ideals of a young photographer, and the paradox that would threaten to undo him.
Smith, called by one essayist ‘The Arrogant Martyr,’ is perhaps one of the greatest photojournalist America has ever produced. In the years before his death in 1978, Smith chronicled 50 years of life and everything in it.
From death to Bob Dylan, from the hell that was the war in the Pacific to the human tragedy of environmental disaster, and from the desperation of poverty to the style and beauty of celebrity, Smith’s camera eye captured the human experience one moment at a time.
These moments have been gathered together into a new compendium, “W. Eugene Smith, Photographs, 1934-1975”. This new volume, published with the cooperation of Smith’s son and the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Arizona, (where his work is archived) represents nothing less than a chronicle of America, and much of the world, in the middle years of this century.
As a war correspondent and pacifist, Smith chronicled the immense tragedy and human cost of the campaign in the South Pacific. He dared to photograph what the censors would never allow to be published during the war — images of the dead, in particular civilian casualties.
This experience would mark the start of a long battle for editorial control over his work that Smith would not begin to win until his second stint with Life magazine — a battle which would ultimately change the very nature and process of photojournalism.
Smith traveled the world to find his subjects, all the while focused on his goal of capturing “the action of life.” This collection, published by Abrams, retrieves long-forgotten and never-published images from the obscurity of the past, blending images from his Life magazine photo essays with the shocking realities of a war with which many Americans were only partly familiar.
And yet the book is more than a mere collection of images. It is filled with essays detailing his life, his influences, his work, and his endless search for the truth. It is a combination of art and artifacts, well rendered and completely unforgettable. The essays will inform you, and the images will stay with you long after the pages are turned and the cover is closed.
This volume will be cherished not only by those with a passion for photography, but by anyone with a love of history and a need for truth — a truth that carries an emotional impact that transcends the time and space between the viewer and the viewed.