W. Eugene Smith

For more information on William Eugene Smith, visit Britannica.com.

(b Wichita, KS, 30 Dec 1918; d Tucson, AZ, 15 Oct 1978). American photographer. He studied photography briefly at the University of Notre Dame, IN, in 1936-7. He began working as a freelance press photographer in 1935, and he rose to prominence as one of the great photojournalists on the staff of Life magazine during World War II. While working as a war correspondent in the Pacific in 1943-4 he damaged his left hand, which almost forced him to abandon photography, but he returned to Life from 1946. He became President of the PHOTO LEAGUE in 1949. He created thousands of intimate and profound images, forging new standards of excellence in photographic documentary series, but only a few were included for publication; this lack of final control over his pictures was a source of great difficulty for him and forced his resignation from Life in 1954. He then worked as a freelance photojournalist, but his high sense of moral purpose and historical awareness created a lifelong conflict between the desire to present the whole photo-essay and the necessities of editorial contraction.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) is considered one of the masters of modern photojournalism. He created some of the most poignant images of war ever made. Smith's photo essays chronicling social injustice deeply moved the American public. His images of the devastating effects of mercury poisoning in Japan were some of his most evocative works.

William Eugene Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas on December 30, 1918. He attended Catholic elementary and high schools there from 1924 to 1935. Smith took his first photographs between 1933 and 1935. Wichita press photographer, Frank Noel, encouraged him to contribute occasional photographs to local newspapers.

When Smith's father committed suicide, newspaper accounts of the incident greatly distorted the actual circumstances. This made him question the standards of American journalism. Smith vowed to become a photojournalist, applying the highest standards to his own career. He was determined to seek absolute personal honesty in his own documentary work.

Smith studied photography on a scholarship at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, from 1936 to 1937. After graduation, he worked for the Wichita Eagle and the Wichita Beacon and then became a Newsweek staff photographer in New York. He was fired because he used what was considered a miniature camera, a 2.5 inch format twin-lens reflex. From 1938 to 1939 Smith worked as a freelance photographer for the Black Star Agency, publishing photographs in Life, Collier's, Harper's Bazaar, and other periodicals, including the New York Times. He worked with miniature cameras, creating an innovative flash technique that allowed him to produce indoor photographs that had the appearance of natural or lamp light. Smith accepted a position as a staff photographer with Life and worked there from 1939 to 1941.

Chronicled the Horrors of War

Smith visited Japan three times. His first visit was during World War II. From 1942 to 1944 Smith was a war correspondent in the Pacific theater for Popular Photography and other publications. In 1944, he returned to Life as a correspondent and photographer. Idealistic and emotional, Smith went to cover the battles of World War II filled with patriotism. He was so horrified by what he saw that he gave up determining who was right or wrong and dedicated himself to showing the horror and suffering he saw.

In 1944, from Saipan, an island in the western Pacific Ocean, Smith said in W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance: The Life and Work of an American Photographer, "… each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the pictures might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future-causing them caution and remembrance and realization." Later, he said, "I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war-the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again."

Smith was assigned to the U.S. aircraft carrier Bunker Hill in 1944 and photographed bombing raids on Tokyo, the invasion of Iwo Jima, and the battle of Okinawa. His dramatic photo essays produced a collection of timeless, evocative images, including that of a tiny, fly covered, half-dead baby held up by a soldier after being rescued from a cave in Saipan; a wounded soldier, hideously bandaged, stretched out in Leyte Cathedral; and a decaying Japanese body on an Iwo Jima beach. Smith's photographic record of the Pacific theater of World War II is considered among the grimmest and most powerful visual indictments of war. On a ridge along the coast of Okinawa in 1945, Smith was hit by a shell fragment that ripped through his left hand, his face, and his mouth. He was unable to work for two years.

Set Standard for Photo Essays

After a long recuperation from his war wounds, Smith worked for Life between 1947 and 1954. His first photograph was one of his most famous. "A Walk to Paradise Garden" was an image of his two children walking toward a sunlit area on a wooded path. It was chosen as the final work in the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1955. Working for Life, Smith published many important photo essays, including "Trial by Jury" in 1948, "The Country Doctor" in 1948, "Nurse Midwife" in 1951, "The Reign of Chemistry" in 1953, and "Spanish Village." These features set a new standard for evocative picture stories. They showed essential human experiences such as compassion, pride, daily labor, birth, and death, with strength, clarity, and beauty. His images were viewed as universal symbols. Smith's photo essay on the work of nurse-midwife, Maude Callen, touched American readers, who donated money to build her clinic in South Carolina. Photographers felt Smith represented the ideal of personal creative expression in the service of journalism. "A Man of Mercy," a profile of Dr. Albert Schweitzer as a medical missionary to lepers in Africa came out in 1954.

Pittsburgh Project

Growing increasingly frustrated with the restrictions of working for Life magazine, Smith resigned at the end of 1954 and became a member of the Magnum Photo Agency in 1955. During the next three years he contributed photo essays to Life, Sports Illustrated, Popular Photography, and other periodicals.

Picture editor, Stefan Lorant, needed some photographs for a pictorial history of Pittsburgh. Proceeds from sales of the book would be used to support an urban renewal program. Smith was offered the assignment and received an advance of $500 with a final fee of $1,200. The job should have taken two to three weeks to complete. Instead Smith turned it into a three-year project that resulted in an essentially unfinished work, the "Pittsburgh" photo essay. He saw in this assignment the opportunity to expand the form of the photographic essay. Smith moved to Pittsburgh where he set up a darkroom in his apartment and hired an assistant and a local guide. Working intensely, he put a lot of his own money into the project. Smith created 11,000 negatives during five months in 1955 and a few weeks in 1957. This project faltered because of Smith's often self-destructive personality, his stubbornness, and legal complications. Lorant's book finally appeared in 1964 and included 64 of Smith's images.

Attempting to salvage the work, Magnum arranged for publishing agreements with Look and Life. The deals fell apart because Smith was dissatisfied with the page layouts and kept changing them. He tried to create a complex set of themes and metaphors with many meanings. The "Pittsburgh" essay has never been published in any form approaching Smith's book-length vision. The most complete version, in his own layout, includes 88 photographs covering 37 pages. It was published in 1959 Photography Annual. Smith considered the work a failure, but the Pittsburgh project is regarded as a remarkable accomplishment that did much to push the photographic essay into a larger dimension.

During this time, Smith's marriage ended, his health deteriorated, and he was threatened with a lawsuit. He ran up huge debts with the Magnum Photo Agency and went bankrupt. This left his family in dire straits, despite the fact that Smith had received two successive Guggenheim Fellowships.

Other assignments followed. In 1956, Smith was commissioned by the American Institute of Architects to photograph contemporary American architecture in color. Smith's second trip to Japan was at the invitation of the Hitachi Corporation in 1961. He was asked to photograph the company and its employees and stayed for one year. In an essay written for the Masters of Photography website, Tony Hayden recalled seeing Smith at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. Smith arrived at Woodstock after photographing singer Bob Dylan in New York City. Smith and Hayden spent the afternoon of the first day of the festival together walking around and taking photos. Hayden recalled that Smith seemed very sympathetic with the peace movement time and felt right at home at Woodstock. Hayden noted, "He was so humble that he could melt into the camera, be the camera and be a part, and subject, of whatever he chose to photograph."

Mercury Poisoning in Minamata

In 1971, Smith returned to Japan for a third time and lived in the small fishing village of Minamata, with his wife Aileen. Although they planned to stay for only three months, the couple stayed for three years. Smith's photos on a mercury poisoning scandal in Minamata were published in Asahi Camera, Camera 35, and Life in an article called "Death-Flow from a Pipe," and in a book called Minamata. The photos brought world attention to the Minamata disease caused by mercury being released into the ocean by a company called Chisso. The most famous photo was that of Kamimura Tomoko in the bath, cradled by her mother. Born in 1956, Tomoko suffered from mercury poisoning. Mercury had entered her bloodstream through the placenta, leaving her blind, deaf, and with useless legs. Smith heard about Tomoko's daily afternoon bath and asked her mother if he could photograph them. He carefully checked the bath's lighting, which came through a dark window. Smith determined that three in the afternoon would be the best time, and took the famous photo in December 1971.

Smith and his wife were attacked and injured in January 1972 during a confrontation between mercury poisoning victims and Chisso employees at the factory in Goi. Victims were violently evicted from Chisso property. Smith had to seek medical treatment in the U.S. for his injuries. Ken Kobre described the attack in an essay at the Masters Exhibition website: "Smith almost lost his eyesight covering the story. He and his wife, armed with camera and tape-recorder, accompanied a group of patients to record a meeting the group expected to have with an official of the company. The official failed to show up. "But," Smith related, "suddenly, a group of about 100 men, on orders from the company, crowded into the room. They hit me first. They grabbed me and kicked me in the crotch and snatched the cameras, then hit me in the stomach. Then they dragged me out and picked me up and slammed my head on the concrete." Smith survived, but with limited vision in one eye.

This was Smith's last major story. It contained several of his most moving images. Smith said, "Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes-just sometimes-one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses to awareness. Much depends on the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought. Someone-or perhaps many-among us may be influenced to heed reason, to find a way to right that which is wrong, and may even search for a cure to an illness. The rest of us may perhaps feel a greater sense of understanding and compassion for those whose lives are alien to our own. Photography is a small voice. I believe in it. If it is well conceived, it sometimes works." Smith died in Tucson, Arizona on October 15, 1978.

Further Reading

Frizot, Michel, New History of Photography, Konemann, 1999.

Hughes, Jim, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance: The Life and Work of an American Photographer, 1989.

Smith, W. Eugene and Ben Maddow, Let Truth Be the Prejudice:W. Eugene Smith His Life and Photographs, Aperture, 1998.

W. Eugene Smith: Photographs 1934-1975, edited by John T. Hill, Harry N. Abrams, 1998.

Life, Fall 1986.

Modern Photography, January 1984; October 1985.

Kobre, Ken, "A Last Interview With W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978)," The Master's Exhibition, http://www.nirvana.demon.co.uk/W.E.Smith.txt (April 17, 1999).

"PhotoReviews," PhotoGuide Japan,http://photojpn.org/DATA/review/docu1/smith.html (April 10, 1999).

"Smith, W. Eugene," Masters of Photography,http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/smith/smith_articles1.html (April 10, 1999).

animator

Personal Information

Born in Los Angeles, California; married, wife's name Denise; children: four
Education: Attended California Institute of the Arts.

Career

Animator; Jambalaya Studio, Glendale, CA, cofounder and director, 1999-.

Life's Work

Considered one of the leading talents among a new generation of animators, Bruce W. Smith has broadened the array of multicultural cartoon characters seen on television and in films. Through his Jambalaya Studio, he has created programs for children and families that focus on authentic depictions of life among racially and ethnically diverse communities.

Was a Cartoon Fanatic

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Smith was a "cartoon fanatic," as he noted in a Jet article. He loved comic books and animated television series, such The Flintstones and Bill Cosby's Fat Albert, as well as Disney animated movies. Yet he was frustrated that these shows didn't include any characters like himself or his friends. He decided that he would make his own artwork based on his own experiences. While his older brothers shot hoops, he spent his time sketching stories and creating his own cartoons. He even drew a comic strip based on the live-action sitcom Sanford and Son. "I was huge into the whole 'blaxploitation period,'" he admitted in a Celebrating Children article.

Smith began attending animation classes at age ten, after his fourth grade teacher noticed his artistic skills and helped arrange for classes. He became the designated class artist for various school projects, and by the time he was 12 had made his first animated movie. Through high school, the aspiring artist continued with extracurricular classes, intent on making art his career. "I was going to do whatever I could--even if it meant 7/11 wages or $5 an hour," he told a writer for the Trinidad Guardian. "It was about getting happy for doing something you love." After graduating from high school, Smith enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. Offered a summer internship and the chance to work full-time in a studio, Smith chose to leave school before getting his degree. It was the right move, he noted in the Guardian, because it gave him the opportunity to work with experts at their craft.

Jobs with major studios soon followed. Smith worked as an animator on the groundbreaking film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a mix of live action and animation that was one of the top-grossing films of 1988 winning four Academy Awards. Critics raved about the film's creative audacity; New York Times writer Janet Maslin hailed its "wildly inventive" interchanges between cartoon and human characters, and praised its animators and other creative crew members for making the film's magic seem "effortless." Smith also provided animation for another Roger Rabbit film, Tummy Trouble. Smith then worked on character design for Bebe's Kids, and as animation supervisor for The Pagemaster, another film blending live action and animation. Subsequent projects included character design for A Goofy Movie and for the television series C-Bear and Jamal.

In 1996 Smith tackled his first directing project with the film Space Jam, on which he served as co-director of animation. Like Roger Rabbit, this film--in which Looney Tunes characters (including Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck) convince real-life basketball superstar Michael Jordan to help them win a game against space aliens--utilized many new animation technologies. Boston Globe critic Jay Carr noted that the movie exploited the "antic wildness" of the original cartoons, observing that its animators "run the ball into a few new realms of animation, cleverly using the technology as opposed to letting the technology use them.... After Space Jam, athletes are going to start lining up outside animators' studios." Smith subsequently worked as supervising animator for the character Kerchak in Disney's Tarzan and for Pacha in The Emperor's New Groove.

Formed Jambalaya Studios

By the late 1990s Smith was growing more interested in creating his own projects. As he explained to a writer for the Los Angeles Times, he was aware of a "void in the market of urban entertainment, especially in the animation side.... [A]nimation was still not ready to diversify." With Hyperion Studio president and chief executive Tom Wilhite, Smith formed Jambalaya Studios, which aimed to create animated programs about ethnically diverse characters and communities. The studio's first project was the series The Proud Family, which Smith wrote, directed, and produced. According to Michael Mallory in the Los Angeles Times, the series showed that there is more to creating ethnically sensitive material than "digitally painting some characters a darker shade of skin tone and calling it diversity. It is a matter of depicting a specific American neighborhood and its people with some truth and fidelity." Indeed, Smith, the father of four children, admitted in the Guardian that he relied heavily on his own background in creating the series. He likened The Proud Family's father, Oscar, to himself, and said that the character of Penny was modeled on his own daughter, while the mother and grandmother were based on his own wife and mother. Like many African-American families, the Proud family includes a working mother, a grandmother, and a father, who in this case is an entrepreneur. Among their neighbors is a Latino family. While The Proud Family was recognized for its role in promoting diverse entertainment, it was also respected as a program that could attract a wider audience. The program was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Another production from Jambalaya was Da Boom Crew, an adventure series that Smith described in Celebrating Children as a cross between Star Wars and Boyz-N-the-Hood. The program follows a group of orphans who make their own video game involving space aliens. A supernatural occurrence pulls them into this fictional world, where they must outsmart monsters and other villains in their search for missing boom carts. Smith was careful, he pointed out, to avoid any hip-hop stereotypes in the show. "Recreating the black experience in animated form is deeper [than that]," he explained. "And once you see Da Boom Crew, you see how these kids are just like you and I."

Smith also worked as an animator on The Indescribable Nth, which was named "Best American Short" at the BBC British Shorts Film Festival in 1999. He was lead animator for the character Pearl in Home on the Range. He serves on the board of directors of Animobile, a company that creates and markets "mobile entertainment" for wireless devices and networks. By the mid-2000s, Smith was widely perceived to be one of the hottest animators in the industry.

Works

Selected works

• Additional animator, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Walt Disney Pictures, 1988.
• Animator, Tummy Trouble, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989.
• Character designer, Bebe's Kids, Hyperion Pictures, 1992.
• Animation supervisor, The Pagemaster, 20th Century Fox, 1994.
• Character designer, A Goofy Movie, Walt Disney Pictures, 1995.
• Animation director, Space Jam, Warner Brothers, 1996.
• Supervising animator, Tarzan, Walt Disney Pictures, 1999 Animator, The Indescribable Nth, 1999.
• Supervising animator, The Emperor's New Groove, Walt Disney Pictures, 2000.
• Lead animator, Home On the Range, Walt Disney Pictures, 2004.

• Character designer, director, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child (co-producer), HBO, 1995-2000.
• Character designer, C-Bear and Jamal, Fox, 1996.
• Director, executive producer, writer, The Proud Family, The Disney Channel, 2001.
• Executive producer, writer, Da Boom Crew, WBKids!, 2004.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Boston Globe, November 15, 1996, p. D1.
• Guardian (Trinidad), October 3, 2004.
• Jet, February 9, 2004, p. 19.
• Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2001, p. F2.
• New York Times, June 22, 1988.

• "Da Boom Crew Rockets into Space," Celebrating Children, www.celebratingchildren.com (April 28, 2005).
• "Disney's The Proud Family Producer, Bruce Smith to present at Animae Caribe 2003," Animae Caribe 2003, www.animaecaribe.com/about/index.php?topic=news&id=0901 (June 29, 2005).
• "The Proud Family Makes Disney Channel Its Home," LaughingPlace, www.laughingplace.com (April 28, 2005).

— E. M. Shostak

A nation-wide chain of retail outlets of books, newspapers, stationery, computers, recordings, games, and other leisure products. William Henry Smith (1792-1865) was born in London where his widowed mother ran a small newspaper business. W. H. Smith extended it, laying the foundations for growth during the second half of the 19th cent. W. H. Smith's son (also W. H.), who entered politics, was satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan as ‘ruler of the Queen's Navee’ when 1st lord of the Admiralty (1877-80).

Smith, W. Eugene (1918-78), American photojournalist, born in Wichita, Kansas. He began selling pictures in 1933, studied with Helene Sanders in New York 1937-8, then joined the Black Star agency and worked in fashion and portraiture. In the period 1939-45 he photographed for Life, Parade, and Flying, between 1942 and 1945, when he was badly wounded, producing powerful war reportage in the Pacific. After a slow recovery he rejoined Life, contributing numerous photo-essays, of which the most famous were Country Doctor (1948), Spanish Village (1951), and A Man of Mercy (1954), about Albert Schweitzer. A charismatic, intense, and often difficult man, Smith fought for a conception of the photo-essay in which the pictures, taken, chosen, and arranged by the photographer, governed the narrative, a position that led to constant friction between him (and other photographers) and the text-orientated editors at Life. In general, however, his work was outgrowing the magazine format and becoming more suited to the photographic book. At all events, he finally resigned from Life in 1955 and joined Magnum.

Important works were still to come, further demonstrating his intense commitment to projects that excited him or stirred his conscience. The famous Pittsburgh study, for example, which was intended to take three months, lasted for three years, and in 1955 alone he took c. 11, 000 photographs in and around the city. In 1971, after a period of architectural and industrial work, he moved to Japan with his wife Aileen and documented the pollution disaster at Minamata (Minamata, 1975). In 1970 a retrospective exhibition, Let Truth Be the Prejudice, had been held at the Jewish Museum, New York. At the end of his life he was active as a teacher. His archive is held at the Center of Creative Photography, University of Arizona at Tucson, and managed commercially by Magnum.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Maddow, B., Let Truth be the Prejudice. W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs (1985).
• Willumson, G. G., William Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay (1991)

• Born: Feb. 2, 1883, Broad Run, Va.
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: Bethel Military Academy, graduated, 1901; law department of the University of Virginia, graduated, 1903
• Representative from Virginia: 1931–67
• Died: Oct. 3, 1976, Alexandria, Va.

As a member of the House Rules Committee for 32 years, including 12 as its chairman, Howard Smith fought for limited government and against nearly all federal programs for education, health, housing, or civil rights. Smith used the full powers of the Rules Committee, as well as his own command of the rules and precedents of the House of Representatives, to frustrate his opponents. During the 1950s the Rules Committee was divided evenly between liberals and conservatives, and a tie vote could prevent legislation from reaching the floor. Sometimes, if Smith thought his side might lose a vote, he would simply go home, knowing that the committee could not meet without its chairman and that bills could not reach the House floor until the committee had acted. In 1961, fearing that the committee would block President John F. Kennedy's legislative programs, liberal Democrats led a revolt against Chairman Smith. They proposed to expand the size of the committee to add more liberal members. Speaker Sam Rayburn (Democrat–Texas) threw his support behind this effort, which won by a slim margin of 217 to 212. Smith continued to fight against social programs, but his power to obstruct had been greatly diminished.

See also Rayburn, Sam; Rules committees

Sources

• Bruce J. Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987)

Original name of Walter Whateley Carington, British psychical researcher. He changed his name in 1933 for family reasons.

Quotes:

"Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)