William Eugene Smith (December 30, 1918 – October 15, 1978) was an American photojournalist. He has been described as "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay." His major photo essays include World War II photographs, the visual stories of an American country doctor and a nurse midwife, the clinic of Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa, the city of Pittsburgh, and the pollution which damaged the health of the residents of Minamata in Japan. His 1948 series, Country Doctor, photographed for Life, is now recognized as "the first extended editorial photo story".
William Eugene Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas, on December 30, 1918, to William H. Smith and his wife Nettie (née Lee). Growing up, Smith had become fascinated by flying and aviation. When Smith was 13, he asked his mother for money to buy photographs of airplanes. His mother instead lent him her camera and encouraged him to visit a local airfield to take his own photos. When he returned with his exposed film, she developed the pictures for him in her own improvised darkroom.
By the time he was a teenager, photography had become his passion; he photographed sports activities at Cathedral High School and at the age of 15 his sports photos were published by Vigil Cay, sports editor at the Wichita Press. On July 25, 1934, The New York Times published a photo by Smith of the Arkansas River dried up into a plate of mud, evidence of the extreme weather events that were devastating the Midwest. These weather conditions had a disastrous effect on agriculture. Smith's father, who was a grain dealer, saw his business head towards bankruptcy and he committed suicide.
Smith graduated from the Wichita North High School in 1936. His mother used her Catholic church connections to enable Smith to obtain a photography scholarship which helped to fund his tuition at the University of Notre Dame, but at the age of 18 he abruptly quit university and moved to New York City. By 1938 he had begun to work for Newsweek where he became known for his perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was eventually fired from Newsweek; he later explained Newsweek wanted him to work with larger format negatives but he refused to abandon the 35 mm Contax camera he preferred to work with. Smith began to work for Life magazine in 1939, quickly building a strong relationship with then picture editor Wilson Hicks.
Smith married Carmen Martinez in 1941, with whom he had five children – their first, Marissa, born in 1942; Juanita (unknown birth year); K. Patrick, in 1943; Shana, in 1953; and Kevin, in 1956. After divorcing Martinez, Smith married Aileen Mioko, a Japanese American environmental activist, in 1971. After ending his relationship with Mioko, he began a relationship with photographer Sherry Suris and moved in with her in New York after completing Minamata in 1974. He passed away in October 15, 1978 from a massive stroke, although he had been suffering from a decline in health due to his work obsessed life. He left a massive archive of work for many to see.
In September 1943, Smith became a war correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and also supplied photos to Life magazine. Smith took photos on the front lines in the Pacific theater of World War II. He was with the American forces during their island-hopping offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Smith's awareness of the brutality of the conflict sharpened the focus of his ambition. He wrote "You can't raise a nation to kill and murder without injury to the mind... It is the reason I am covering the war for I want my pictures to carry some message against the greed, the stupidity and the intolerances that cause these wars and the breaking of many bodies." Ben Maddow wrote: "Smith's photographs of 1943 through 1945 show his swift development from talent to genius." In 1945, Smith was seriously injured by mortar fire while photographing the Battle of Okinawa.
In 1946, he took his first photograph since being injured: a picture of his two children walking in the garden of his home which he titled The Walk to Paradise Garden. The photograph became famous when Edward Steichen used it as one of the key images in the exhibition The Family of Man, which Steichen curated in 1955. After spending two years undergoing surgery, Smith continued to work at Life until 1955.
Between 1948 and 1954 Smith photographed for Life magazine a series of photo essays with a humanist perspective which laid the basis of modern photojournalism, and which were, in the estimate of Encyclopædia Britannica, "characterized by a strong sense of empathy and social conscience."
In August 1948 Smith photographed Dr. Ernest Ceriani in the town of Kremmling, Colorado, for several weeks, covering the doctor's arduous work in a thinly populated western environment, grappling with life and death situations. (One of the most vivid images shows Ceriani looking exhausted in a kitchen, having performed a Caesarean section during which both mother and baby died.) The essay Country Doctor was published by Life on September 20, 1948. It has been described by Sean O'Hagan as "the first extended editorial photo story".
In late 1949, Smith was sent to the UK to cover the General Election, when the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was re-elected with a tiny majority. Smith also travelled to Wales where he photographed a series of studies of miners in South Wales Valleys. Critics have compared Smith's work to similar studies made by Bill Brandt. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Dai Smith located a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photographs published in Life.
From Wales, Smith travelled to Spain where he spent a month in 1950, photographing the village of Deleitosa, Extremadura, focusing on themes of rural poverty. Smith attracted the suspicion of the local Guardia Civil, until he finally made an abrupt exit across the border to France. A Spanish Village was published in Life on April 9, 1951, to great acclaim. Ansel Adams wrote Smith a letter of praise, which Smith carried in his pocket for three years, unable to write a reply.
In 1951, Smith persuaded Life editor Edward Thompson to let him do a photo-journalistic profile of Maude E. Callen, a black nurse midwife working in rural South Carolina. For weeks Smith accompanied Callen on her exhausting schedule, rising before dawn and working into the evening. The essay Nurse Midwife was published in Life on December 3, 1951. It was well received and resulted in thousands of dollars in donations to create the Maude Callen Clinic, which opened in Pineville, South Carolina in May 1953, with Smith present at the ceremony.
In 1954, Smith photographed an extensive photo-essay about the work of Albert Schweitzer at his clinic at Lambaréné in Gabon, West Africa. It was later revealed that one of his most famous images had been extensively manipulated. Smith made many layouts of his Schweitzer pictures which he submitted to Life, but the final layout of the story published on November 15, 1954, entitled A Man of Mercy, angered Smith because editor Edward Thompson used fewer pictures than Smith wanted, and Smith thought the layout crude. He sent a formal 60-day notice of resignation letter to Life in November 1954.
After leaving Life magazine, Smith joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1955. There he was commissioned by Stefan Lorant to produce a photographic profile of the city of Pittsburgh. The project was supposed to take him a month and to produce 100 images. It ended up occupying more than two years and producing 13,000 photographic negatives. The intended book was never delivered to Lorant, and Smith's obsessive work was bailed out by money from Magnum, causing strain between Smith and the photo-journalist collective.