A pictorial and narrative account of the perpetrators and victims of methyl-mercury poisoning in the fishing and farming town of Minamata, Japan, chronicling the long struggle of the stricken to obtain indemnities from the Chisso Corporation.

Minamata

Politics & Social Sciences

Smith, W. Eugene

Politics & Government

Henry Holt Co.

W. Eugene Smith, an icon in the field of twentieth-century photography, is best known as the master of the humanistic photographic essay. Smith’s most expressive and frequently reproduced images—World War II combat, the country doctor and nurse-midwife, Pittsburgh, Albert Schweitzer in Africa, rural Spanish villagers, and the mentally ill in Haiti—have altered our perception and understanding of the world.
In 1959, Smith became obsessed with creating an extended photo-essay that he called “The Big Book,” a complex retrospective of his work that would reflect his philosophy of art and critique of the world. Smith’s layout grouped photographs out of context and chronological order to form a series of connected “visual chapters and subchapters” that were intended to have a Joycean or Faulknerian literary quality. After three years of intense labor, Smith completed two handmade folio-sized maquettes to send to publishers. With 380 pages and 450 images, The Big Book was universally rejected as unviable and non-commercial, and it was never published.
Now, five decades later, a facsimile of W. Eugene Smith’s The Big Book, which is part of the Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona, is in print for the first time. Accompanying the facsimile is a supporting volume with a foreword by Dr. Katherine Martinez, Director of CCP; an introduction by William S. Johnson, who arranged Smith’s archive at CCP; an essay by the renowned Swiss critic John Berger; notes on the Smith Collection at CCP by archivist Leslie Squyres and Jennifer Jae Gutierrez; “The Walk to Paradise Garden,” by W. Eugene Smith; and an appendix that maps Smith’s complete layout with titles, dates, and reproductions of each image from original prints. The Big Book is an essential primary source document for the study of both the history of photography and the history of the photobook. This set, in slipcase, will likely be the most comprehensive catalogue of W. Eugene Smith’s work ever published.

The Big Book

Arts & Photography

BERGER, JOHN

Photography & Video

University of Texas Press

Presents thirty-six series of photographs that tell the stories of workers, soldiers, scientists, musicians, doctors, and the poor

W Eugene Smith

Smith Jr., Clifford

Individual Artists

Aperture

W Eugene Smith Pa

SMITH

Presents thirty-six series of photographs that tell the stories of workers, soldiers, scientists, musicians, doctors, and the poor

Photographs by W. Eugene Smith Illustrated biography by Ben Maddow Afterword by John G. Morris Let Truth Be The Prejudice documents the life and work of W. Eugene Smith, a man whose work expanded the range and depth of photography, bringing new aesthetic and moral power to the photo essay. Smith was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and raised according to traditional American values, believing in the nobility of America and the injustice of war. He began taking pictures with his mother's camera while still a boy and continued this practice throughout his schooling. In 1937 his burning ambition took him to New York City, where his rise as a professional photographer was meteoric. Before he was twenty-one, Smith had placed hundreds of photographs in the major picture magazines of the time. Dramatic composition, a hard-edged brilliance, and a mastery of lighting were evident even in this early work. But the moment of true ground-breaking would occur during World War II. It was when Smith went ashore with the Marines at Saipan, Guam, and Iwo Jima that his work and his sense of moral responsibility came together. He wrote: "Each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future-- causing them caution and remembrance and realization." Breaking from the concerns of the mass media, his personal priorities were born. Smith's war photographs earned him repeated and justified comparisons to Mathew Brady. His coverage of American prisoner-of-war camps helped convince the Japanese that their fears were exaggerated, and stopped the suicide of thousands of terrified citizens upon the advance of American troops. This would not be the last time that Smith's work would change as well as document history. After the war, Smith became a staff photographer at Life magazine, where he created many of his most famous photographs. The essays "Country Doctor" and "Nurse Midwife" influenced an entire generation. Smith moved from mine villages in Great Britain to Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa to a sweeping study of Spanish village life. At a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan he created haunting images of hatred, fear, and bigotry, which beautifully counterpoint the humanity of his great Life0 essays. Smith also showed his skill at portraiture, shooting many of the luminaries of the time. His frustrations with commercial publishing finally led to a split with Life magazine in 1954, a true case of "artistic differences." He devoted his remaining twenty-four years to independent projects. It was a period of intense personal suffering and poverty. During these years he pushed one project, "Pittsburgh," virtually to the breaking point and along the way created photography's greatest urban landscape. His last great essay, "Minamata," depicted both the human suffering caused by mercury poisoning in a Japanese industrial port, and helped put an end to that pollution. A severe beating by factory thugs aggravated his already failing health and on October 15, 1978, he died. Over the span of forty driven years, Smith dreamed on an epic scale and his accomplishments were heroic. He once wrote: "Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold." Here is the definitive work on Smith's life and work, containing his major photo-essays, the portrait work, and spanning his brilliant career from his days aboard an aircraft carrier, through the breadth of Pittsburgh, to the human suffering explicit in his last great essay in Minamata. All these images have been painstakingly reproduced to insure the greatest quality in testament to Smith's genius. Moral passion and photographic truth were inseparable to Gene Smith. He pursued both and the measure of his greatness is that he compromised neither. His achievements were realized at no small cost to himself and those around him. In the accompanying biography, "The Wounded Angel," author Ben Maddow takes the measure of the man and looks unflinchingly at the muses and demons that drove W. Eugene Smith to the fulfillment of his dream of greatness. Maddow's biography is the first published in-depth portrayal of Gene Smith's life. It is a dramatic saga made all the more vivid by Maddow's commitment to the facts and his subject.

Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith His Life and Photographs

Maddow, Ben

Smith, Eugene W.

Social Sciences

Center for Creative Photography

W. Eugene Smith: Masters of Photography (Aperture Masters of Photography)

W. Eugene Smith : más real que la realidad (Spanish and English Edition)

La Fábrica Editorial

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Books by Smith, W. Eugene