A personal hero: W. Eugene Smith, or Two Degrees of Separation
This is a man I wish I had met. I worked for a small bi-weekly suburban newspaper in North Jersey. I got to cover everything: sports, store openings, mall events, portraits. But my editor met Smith at the International Center for Photography and, after his presentation, walked up to him, clutched his hand, and said “Thank you.” I believe that’s all anyone who looked at Smith’s career work could say. From his World War II photographs, through his images of the country doctor in Idaho, the midwife in South Carolina, and his images of Pittsburgh and New York through the broken glass of his midtown loft…he created black-and-white images that took the dark and made it resonate and shimmer, and most of all the shattering images of Minamata, the Japanese fishing village near Nagaski that had suffered mercury poisoning because of random chemical dumping…these are unforgettable.
Smith himself created and survived two broken marriages. He was no saint. He was a alcoholic who also used amphetamines to stay awake through printing sessions that could last up to three days. He was a womanizer. In spite of it all, his eye and artistry did not fail him. For years I wanted to be Gene Smith minus the booze and pills. I never got there. I drank too much but had long before renounced my taste for “dry goods.” But I also lost my eye. I know perfectly well that getting sober might make me a worse photographer, but admitting my sickness and knowing I could never become the reincarnation of Eugene Smith had something to do with getting me a bit more level-headed than I’d been before. You perhaps be a bit dissipated to be a serious visual artist.
As far as I know, Gene Smith never drank absinthe. It wasn’t available back then. When he died in October 1978, it was from a stroke in a supermarket. He fell and bashed his head into the shelving. He was 59 years old and looked 25 years older.
At the 1985 Smith retrospective the the Philadelphia Museum, people stopped in front of the Minamata photographs, wept, and gasped. I was one of them. I’d seen them before the huge prints in the Philadelphia Museum but getting up close brought them home with incredible power.
I believe the photo below, “Tomoko in her Bath,” was pulled from the official Smith corpus at the request of Tomoko’s family. If someone asks me to drop my copy, I will do it.
