Eugene Smith and Minamata
PHOTO NOTE: Minamata tells the true story of how at the end of his long career a seemingly washed up photographer (albeit a truly great one) would find the courage to create his most moving and socially important work. I’ll let you read the blurbs for yourself and recommend you watch the trailer, but this is a film that shows how photography - perhaps more so than any of the other visual arts - still has the power to change the world.
MINAMATA Official Trailer (2021) www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP3pKTssw_E
“Available light is any damn light that is available!” – W. Eugene Smith
If there’s one quote that gets to the essence of Gene Smith as a photographer, than that’s it. Straight to the point, no nonsense, and it’s all about the light. William Eugene Smith was born in Kansas in 1918. At 13 his mother bought him a camera and he never looked back. He is regarded by many as the best photojournalist of the 20th century and "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay." www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smi...
He was Life Magazine’s greatest ever photographer and also their most troublesome. A notoriously prodigious artist, who when fully engaged in a project became obsessive. The best example of this was in 1955, soon after joining Magnum Photos after being fired by Life Magazine. His assignment was to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh photographing the steel mills. Two years and 13,000 photographs later he gave up the project. But the photographs that have been seen are truly astounding.
He made his name in Life Magazine as a war correspondent. While photographing the battle for Okinawa he was seriously wounded and repatriated to the United States. His war photos are full of real pathos, like the one where American soldiers rescue a dying baby in the fields. As he once said, “What use is having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?”
But it would be a mistake to think of Gene Smith as a mere photojournalist. The range of his work is almost unparalleled in the history of photography.
Lovers of music often think of him as the greatest photographer of jazz there ever was. From his Bohemian loft apartment in New York City in 1957, he played host to jazz musicians as legendary as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans and the emerging genius John Coltrane. Not only did he make nearly 1,500 recordings of these sessions, but he took an estimated 40,000 negatives. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo198266625.html
From the same loft window high above the street he took some legendary street shots – all in black and white because Gene Smith wouldn’t take colour seriously. Smith once said, “In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.”
The light coming from the dark. It was a technique he was renowned for: Chiaroscuro. Painters have used it for centuries, including Caravaggio.
So when in 1970 Smith’s final great assignment came to him, after years of substance abuse and professional neglect, he used all his immense technical skills to produce work that would change forever the way people thought about the social responsibility of corporations. In the fishing village of Minamata in Japan, people were dying of mercury poisoning from toxic wastes being discarded directly into the sea.
The fishers were catching and eating the highly toxic fish, children were born with gross deformities and people were dying in scenes reminiscent of the post-atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Smith joined the community and photographed their desperate plight and protests. He also found love again and his heart warmed especially towards the children. But these were not just any photographs one might see in the World News pages. From these dark images there emerged a light of hope, love and true compassion.
I will provide a link for you here to what I consider one of the greatest photographs ever taken (worth ten thousand golden hour sunsets) – possibly Smith’s finest and a true distillation of a life’s work. Only the hard of heart could not shed a tear of empathy at this purest form of a mother’s love that one could ever imagine. It is a modern equivalent of Michelangelo's Pieta. Truly the climax of the movie Minimata.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoko_and_Mother_in_the_Bath
This is what photography should be! I’ll leave the final word here to Gene Smith himself:
"A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought."
W. Eugene Smith died of a stroke on October 15, 1978. He wasn’t quite 60.
SOME MORE RESOURCES TO STUDY:
www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/w-eugene-smith/
www.life.com/photographer/w-eugene-smith/
The Genius of W. Eugene Smith
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUyOJs69pQ&t=49s
Masters of Photography, W. Eugene Smith
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNvY3r0NGXs&t=25s
Eugene Smith and Minamata
PHOTO NOTE: Minamata tells the true story of how at the end of his long career a seemingly washed up photographer (albeit a truly great one) would find the courage to create his most moving and socially important work. I’ll let you read the blurbs for yourself and recommend you watch the trailer, but this is a film that shows how photography - perhaps more so than any of the other visual arts - still has the power to change the world.
MINAMATA Official Trailer (2021) www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP3pKTssw_E
“Available light is any damn light that is available!” – W. Eugene Smith
If there’s one quote that gets to the essence of Gene Smith as a photographer, than that’s it. Straight to the point, no nonsense, and it’s all about the light. William Eugene Smith was born in Kansas in 1918. At 13 his mother bought him a camera and he never looked back. He is regarded by many as the best photojournalist of the 20th century and "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay." www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smi...
He was Life Magazine’s greatest ever photographer and also their most troublesome. A notoriously prodigious artist, who when fully engaged in a project became obsessive. The best example of this was in 1955, soon after joining Magnum Photos after being fired by Life Magazine. His assignment was to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh photographing the steel mills. Two years and 13,000 photographs later he gave up the project. But the photographs that have been seen are truly astounding.
He made his name in Life Magazine as a war correspondent. While photographing the battle for Okinawa he was seriously wounded and repatriated to the United States. His war photos are full of real pathos, like the one where American soldiers rescue a dying baby in the fields. As he once said, “What use is having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?”
But it would be a mistake to think of Gene Smith as a mere photojournalist. The range of his work is almost unparalleled in the history of photography.
Lovers of music often think of him as the greatest photographer of jazz there ever was. From his Bohemian loft apartment in New York City in 1957, he played host to jazz musicians as legendary as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans and the emerging genius John Coltrane. Not only did he make nearly 1,500 recordings of these sessions, but he took an estimated 40,000 negatives. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo198266625.html
From the same loft window high above the street he took some legendary street shots – all in black and white because Gene Smith wouldn’t take colour seriously. Smith once said, “In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.”
The light coming from the dark. It was a technique he was renowned for: Chiaroscuro. Painters have used it for centuries, including Caravaggio.
So when in 1970 Smith’s final great assignment came to him, after years of substance abuse and professional neglect, he used all his immense technical skills to produce work that would change forever the way people thought about the social responsibility of corporations. In the fishing village of Minamata in Japan, people were dying of mercury poisoning from toxic wastes being discarded directly into the sea.
The fishers were catching and eating the highly toxic fish, children were born with gross deformities and people were dying in scenes reminiscent of the post-atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Smith joined the community and photographed their desperate plight and protests. He also found love again and his heart warmed especially towards the children. But these were not just any photographs one might see in the World News pages. From these dark images there emerged a light of hope, love and true compassion.
I will provide a link for you here to what I consider one of the greatest photographs ever taken (worth ten thousand golden hour sunsets) – possibly Smith’s finest and a true distillation of a life’s work. Only the hard of heart could not shed a tear of empathy at this purest form of a mother’s love that one could ever imagine. It is a modern equivalent of Michelangelo's Pieta. Truly the climax of the movie Minimata.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoko_and_Mother_in_the_Bath
This is what photography should be! I’ll leave the final word here to Gene Smith himself:
"A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought."
W. Eugene Smith died of a stroke on October 15, 1978. He wasn’t quite 60.
SOME MORE RESOURCES TO STUDY:
www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/w-eugene-smith/
www.life.com/photographer/w-eugene-smith/
The Genius of W. Eugene Smith
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUyOJs69pQ&t=49s
Masters of Photography, W. Eugene Smith
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNvY3r0NGXs&t=25s