W. Eugene Smith is considered to be one of the world's
greatest photojournalists. Smith saw himself as a perfectionist,
artist, and a poet. He used these traits to change the world of
the photo-essay, and to create some of the most compelling photo-essays
of the twentieth century.
"
Humanity", Smith liked
to tell his students, "is worth more than a picture of humanity
that serves no purpose other than exploitation." A fit epitaph,
those words, for a premier master of photojournalism, an area of
the medium in which exploitation of one's subjects is a line all
too easily transgressed.
Yet, during much of his productive life, Smith clung passionately
to his chosen side of that line; it was a basic belief underlying
his work (both the successes and the arguable failures). Basic,
too, and problematic from time to time, was an equally passionate
belief in the integrity of his photographs, of the individual statements
in which form, tone, and humanity coalesced with such grace and
power.
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