Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/02/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]To back up John: Smith was what some called a miraculous printer; to the point that one assistant shooting with him one day took a camera from him and asked, what exposure are you at? and he said, I have no idea. All of that work was done in the darkroom. He was a photographer of darkness before all which made the printing particularly demanding. He often radically underexposed and then burned in only that part of the image he wanted you to see first and most forcefully. The new "Jazz loft" book uses only his master prints for its reproductions and they are amazing. Often there was almost no light at all. John, your blog on the Life essay and Smith's writing about it is excellent. I'd add that Smith, as grandiose and delusional as he could be, was dedicated to a certain notion of truth in art. Mary McCarthy on the Dick Cavett show in the late 1970s said of Lillian Hellman, in this regard, everything she's ever written is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'. (Hellman sued for $5 million...) Anyway this is how Life magazine was, in Smith's view: it couldn't touch something without turning it into a lie. So in addition to his inability to connect with Chaplin and more to the point Chaplin's refusal to see and recognize Smith as an equal artistic genius -- in addition to that as irritant stood Smith's growing unhappiness with the narratives Life imposed on his photographic essays, which were deeply thought out, as you note. The breaking point came with an essay on Albert Schweitzer, whom Smith found to be an ambiguous figure, nasty, imperious, the worst kind of colonizer, while at the same time doing good. Smith endeavored to show this but Life sanitized the whole story of course. Smith quit not long after that, throwing his life (and his family's life) into chaos and all of them into penury. He went and spent most of two years in Pittsburgh taking pictures that, given the original low-paying assignment, probably required less than a week's work. They are some of the greatest American photographs of the post-war years, absolutely astonishing. They were finally gathered together in significant number only a few years ago and the book he'd long dreamed of came into being. It's called "Dream Street." Definitely worth owning. The Jazz Loft book is superb too, though not quite as overwhelming. Vince P On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 7:32 PM, John Edwin Mason <profmason at yahoo.com>wrote: > S.D. wrote: > > > From what I recall, Smith was a poor printer. Doing the printing himself > > was more of an economic necessity than part of his photographic > > avocation. > > He was a brilliant printer. In "W. Eugene Smith, The Camera as > Conscience," John T. Hill pretty much sums it up: > > "His prints became legend, featuring impenetrable darks of blackness and > ranging to clean linen whites. ...There were breathtaking in their beauty > and difficulty to reproduce." > > In any case, regarding the Chaplin photo essay, he was gloomy about the > essay as a whole, not his prints: > > > http://johnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_mason_photogra/2010/02/eugene-smith-charlie-chaplin.html > > http://bit.ly/cOvg1X > > --John > > ****************************** > John Edwin Mason, Photography: > http://www.JohnEdwinMason.com > Charlottesville and Cape Town > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >