[Leica] Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith

[jayanand at gmail.com (Jayanand Govindaraj)]

Vince,
I would like to read the article, too.
Cheers
Jayanand

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:35 AM, Vince Passaro <passaro.vince at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> George,
>
> You didn't miss that much -- an amusing Welshman discovers that Gene Smith
> took a lot of pictures there for Life Mag when sent to cover the elections
> of 1950, in which Henry Luce of Time Life had some emotional stake in 
> seeing
> Labour lose (they didn't). ?Smith went and photographed the miners. The
> documentarian calls the pictures "lost" because Life only published three 
> of
> them, but off he trundled to the Center for Creative Photography at Tucson
> and finds the boxes in the Gene Smith archive marked Britain 1950, and
> indeed there it all was where it was supposed to have been, so it's not
> clear why they're "lost". There are also twenty pages of these photos in 
> the
> Abrams book W Eugene Smith Photographs 1934-1975, and other pages in other
> catalogues that followed major exhibitions. People who know Smith's work
> well know all about these pictures.
>
> Anyway the best part of the wee documentary by the roly-poly Welshman is
> when he digs up the last surviving member of the trio of miners whose
> blackened faces, set against the hills of South Wales, formed one of 
> Smith's
> iconic images. ?This fellow jovially explained how Smith encountered them 
> on
> the way home from work and asked if he could shoot their picture: then told
> them where to stand and where to look. Much about how Britain was faring in
> 1950; not much enlightening at all about Smith. For example, it would have
> been typical that Life didn't publish what Smith wanted them to in the way
> he wanted them to; that's why he eventually quit the place, leading to his
> artistic freedom (Pittsburgh project, Jazz Loft project, and Minimata) but
> also his financial ruin.
>
> If there are other Smith fans out there, I have an essay coming out in
> Harper's magazine later this year on him; when it's available I'll post it
> on the LUG.
>
> Vince P
>
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