Together with Avedon, Penn, Steichen, Strand, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Albert Watson and a few more, he is one of the truly great photographers. For me. They are all different and perhaps I should not compare them. So I don´t. Read the article from The Guardian, by Sean O `Hagan.
See the images and imagine the sound that he recorded. 😊 Pelle
Smith took many famous pictures, but also taped hours of audio of jazz greats, writers and artists of the day in his New York loft. A new book explores his strange world
Smith was perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay. His visual narratives, usually published in Life magazine, were often brutally atmospheric. He evoked the horrors of the second world war in the Pacific, where he was injured by mortar fire, and chronicled the working life of Dr Ernest Ceriani in the small town of Kremmling, Colorado, in his 1948 series, Country Doctor, now recognised as the first extended editorial photo story.
In 1955, Smith became a member of the Magnum picture agency, travelling to Pittsburgh for his first assignment, which entailed producing 100 photographs in three weeks to mark the city’s first centenary. He worked on the project for three years, producing around 21,000 photographs. Today, his legacy is maintained by the W Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, which celebrates and encourages the kind of humanistic photography he pioneered, if not the impossible tasks he set himself and his beleaguered editors.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smith-photographer-record-everything
• Gene Smith’s Sink by Sam Stephenson is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 22 August ($26)
