William Eugene Smith’s career began with the same tone of unpredictability and chaos that would dog him for the rest of it.

Only a month before Smith graduated high school, about to go on to pursue photography on scholarship at Notre Dame, his father killed himself in a hospital car park.

Smith only attended the school for a year before leaving to pursue a freelance career in New York City.

His mother lived with him in the Bronx for a time after the move; a photographer herself, she worked as his darkroom assistant. Sam Stephenson, a biographer, wrote that she was “a devout, converted Catholic, domineering and stern… From her, he inherited an indomitable willpower.”

An alcoholic addicted to amphetamines, Smith’s need for perfection drove him to fight his editors, even when his meticulous attention proved detrimental to his projects. Smith was fired from Newsweek for repeatedly using a small-format camera that the publication prohibited, and he quit LIFE magazine ten years later over an argument about how they presented one of his images, a picture of Nobel prize winning physician Albert Schweitzer (O’Hara, 2017).

His photos, however, were revolutionary. They pulled him into the world’s narrative and earned him a reputation as a humanitarian and set a standard for photojournalism that would hold for years. His work on projects such as “Country Doctor,” “Spanish Village,” and “Man of Mercy” cemented his legacy as a master of the photo essay.

Smith captured snapshots of history that became icons of their time. He once said that he saw his photos of World War II not as a news platform, but “a powerful emotional catalyst” that conveyed the tragedies of war.

Critics argue that Smith was driven by his “huge ego” (O’Hara, 2017). But after he died, almost 2,000 reels of audio tapes with about 4,500 hours of recordings were found, documenting the eight years he spent living in a loft on 6th Avenue. He kept photocopies of all the letters he’d ever written. He kept hundreds of notebooks of his writings, and several hundred thousand photographic prints and negatives (O’Hara, 2017).

Sam Stephenson, who devoted 20 years to researching a biography on Smith’s life, questioned his compulsiveness. He doesn’t disagree that Smith was driven, at least in part, by ego.

“But what was the motivation for the tapes?” he said. “They are certainly not ego-driven. There was nothing he could have done with them creatively or commercially. The irony is that they indicate what was motivating him more than anything else, but what that was exactly remains unknowable. It is part of the great complex psychological mystery of W Eugene Smith.”

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Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/06/w-eugene-smith-photographer-record-everything

https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-Eugene-Smith

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/w-eugene-smith?all/all/all/all/0

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/w-eugene-smith-master-of-the-photographic-essay/

http://iphf.org/inductees/william-eugene-smith/

https://www.americanphotomag.com/

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/w-eugene-smith-i-didnt-write-the-rules-why-should-i-follow-them/