![]() In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several weeks. Documentary features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly popular with readers. “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)Īfter his recovery he went back to work for Life again. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. His new lease of life was symbolised by the first photograph he took after his wound. On Smith himself was seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that went on until 1947. 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. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos changed. 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. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. 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. ![]() With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years. He embarked on his professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.Ī 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. But he dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he attended the New York Institute of Photography. 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. Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. His painstakingly researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s. 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. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. 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. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Through that courage he left us a body of work that will live forever as masterpieces of the art of photography. 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.” ![]() Smith’s use of chiaroscuro makes his images sing and flow, like a Bach fugue. Look at the photographs below, really look deeply at them. Once seen, for example his seminal photograph Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1971), they are never forgotten. He created some of the most memorable and moving photographs in the history of the medium. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist Eugene Smith Untitled 1955Įxhibition dates: 27th August – 27th November 2011Ĭenter for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Dance of the Flaming Coke, W. Eugene Smith - Photographs A retrospective, W. Ernest Ceriani Following the Loss of a Mother and Child During Childbirth, gelatin silver print, Guardia Civil Spain, Harper's Bazaar, life, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Minamata, Minamata: A Warning to the World, picture magazines, Pittsburgh, Saipan, Steel Mill Worker Pittsburgh, The Family of Man, The Spinner, The Wake, time, W. Tags: Albert Schweitzer, Albert Schweitzer - Man of Mercy, American art, american artist, American documentary photography, American fine art photography, American photography, American social documentary photography, Aspen, Collier’s, Colorado, Dance of the Flaming Coke, Dr. Categories: American, american photographers, Berlin, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, space and time
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