Arty Farty Friday ~ William Eugene Smith

William Eugene Smith, born on 30 December 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, was a photo-journalist, famous in his time, and some say in his methods and output, born way "before his time".
Snips from pbs.org, HERE

The war in the South Pacific, a country doctor in Colorado, victims of industrial pollution in a Japanese village — all of these were captured in unforgettable photographs by the legendary W. Eugene Smith. No matter where, what, or whom he was shooting, Smith drove himself relentlessly to create evocative portraits that revealed the essence of his subjects in a way that touched the emotions and conscience of viewers. The works of this brilliant and complicated man remain a plea for the causes of social justice and a testament to the art of photography. Smith learned about photography from his mother, Nettie. By the age of thirteen he was committed to the craft, and by twenty-one he had been published in dozens of magazines. A breakthrough for Smith came during World War II, when he received an assignment to cover the war in the Pacific. In the spirit that characterized his lifelong approach toward his work, Smith threw himself into the action. He photographed on land, in the sea, and in the air, hoping to get to the center of the experience of war, and, in his words, “sink into the heart of the picture.”

After the war Smith became one of the leading lights in LIFE magazine, with a variety of projects such as

“Nurse Midwife,” the story of Maude Callen, a black woman working in an impoverished community in the rural South, Smith wanted his essay to “make a very strong point about racism, by simply showing a remarkable woman doing a remarkable job in an impossible situation.”

Smith relied heavily on alcohol and amphetamines to keep up with the demands he made on himself. He was a perfectionist's perfectionist in his approach to photography. The volume of his work is astounding: tens of thousands of photographs on each project, with months, even years of research to reach a proper understanding of each subject.

 The kind of photo-essay for which Smith became  famous

From an article in The Guardian:

...Even at this early age, Smith was an unpredictable and self-sabotaging individual. At Newsweek, he was fired for repeatedly using a small-format camera that the magazine’s photo department prohibited. He quit Life a decade later after a row about how they had presented one of his images of the Nobel prize-winning physician and humanitarian campaigner Albert Schweitzer.

Controversy dogged him even after his death: what many consider his most powerful photograph, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1971), a starkly intimate portrait of Ryoko Uemara bathing her naked daughter, Tomoko, who has severe deformities from the effects of mercury poisoning, was withdrawn from further publication in 1997 at the wishes of Tomoko’s family.

Throughout his career, Smith railed against authority, often alienating the very editors whose imposed boundaries he needed when his obsessive quest for perfectionism became self-defeating. “Whatever demons that drive him were certainly not appeased by the alcohol and amphetamines,” says Stephenson. “One of the themes that I hope is apparent in the book is the sense that he needed care and attention in order to get his work done. Mostly he didn’t have it in his life, because he was so hard to work with. It is one of the great ironies of his life that he alienated the people – editors, assistants – who would have helped him the most.”

In the later years of his life (he died aged 59) Smith lived in a loft in New York City, where artists, jazz musicians and other luminaries of the time would gather. There is a huge collection of photographs from that era, as well as another huge collection of audio tapes.

More startling still are the 1,740 reels of audio tape, which were made by Smith between 1957 and 1965 in his previous loft apartment in 6th Avenue near West 28th Street. They contain around 4,500 hours of mostly ambient recordings often caught clandestinely on microphones he draped on dangling leads throughout the loft and in its stairways. These tapes reveal Smith’s seeming desire to document everything going on around him – and not just through photographs.