After returning from years of war coverage, Peter van Agtmael tries to piece together the memory, identity, race, class, and family, in a landscape which has become as surreal as the war he left behind.
•
Photo Don Getsug
W. Eugene Smith
photographer
William Eugene Smith was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas. He took his first photographs at the age of 15 for two local newspapers. In 1936, Smith entered Notre Dame University in Wichita, where a special photographic scholarship was created for him. A year later he left the university and went to New York City, and after studying with Helene Sanders at the New York Institute of Photography. In 1937, he began working for News-Week (later Newsweek). He was fired for refusing to use medium-format cameras and joined the Black Star agency as a freelancer.
Smith worked as a war correspondent for Flying magazine (1943-44), and a year later for LIFE. He followed the island-hopping American offensive against Japan and suffered severe injuries while simulating battle conditions for Parade, which required him to undergo surgery for the next two years.
Once recuperated, Eugene Smith worked for LIFE again between 1947 and 1955, before resigning to join Magnum as an associate. In 1957, he became a full member of Magnum. Smith was fanatically dedicated to his mission as a photographer. Because of this dedication, he was often regarded by editors as ‘troublesome’.
A year after he moved to Tucson, to teach at the University of Arizona, Smith died of a stroke. His archives are held at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.
Today, Smith’s legacy lives on through the W. Eugene Smith Fund to promote ‘humanistic photography’, founded in 1980, which awards photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.
•
RELATED ARTICLES
-
A Borderless Reality / Carlos GaraicoaOct 4, 2019 – Feb 2, 2020
Carlos Garaicoa investigates how the city and its architecture reflect and influence society. Havana’s abandoned construction projects and the lost dreams they represent are at the core of his meditations.
-
Lucian Freud / The Self PortraitsOct 27, 2019 – Jan 26, 2020
In a world first, we unite Lucian Freud’s self-portraits in one extraordinary exhibition. See more than 50 paintings, prints and drawings in which this modern master of British art turns his unflinching eye firmly on himself.
-
The Redaction TrilogyOct 24, 2019 – Jan 26, 2020
Hugh Lane Gallery is delighted to present The Redaction Trilogy, the first solo museum exhibition in Ireland by collaborative duo Kennedy Browne: Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne. (more…)
-
So British! Collection PinaultJun 5, 2019 – May 11, 2020
Since its creation 30 years ago, the Pinault collection has grown quickly to become a major presence in the contemporary arts. This exhibition focuses on the British artists present in the collection. Artists include Nigel Cooke, Jonathan Wateridge, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Toby Ziegler, among others.
-
On the Peripheryby Sinziana Velicescu
Sinziana Velicescu’s work is a minimalist and abstract approach, a modern chronicling of a quiet land surveyor, completely separated of sentimentality. The publication of her series is a documentation of time, bracketed in images of framed surfaces of space.
-
Art Now / Sophia Al-MariaSep 20, 2019 – Feb 23, 2020
Drawing on personal heritage and fictional future projections, Sophia Al-Maria’s protagonists reflect on the narratives and languages they have inherited as children of various colonial legacies.
-
extraORDINAIREOct 12 – Dec 15, 2019
This free inaugural event with its seven original exhibitions by artists including Thomas Struth, Laura Henno, Connie Slab, Lisette Model, Mary Ellen Mark, and others, is, above all, an opportunity to share a preview of the Institut pour la Photographie’s project.
-
Slower than Slowly / Yuko MohriSep 11 – Dec 14, 2019
Over the past weeks we have had the unswerving pleasure of sharing Yuko Mohri’s company on a daily basis (work, apples, dinners, some Prosecco), as she has carefully crafted her exhibition, slower than slowly, a ballet of unwilling objects conjured from thin air (more…)
