William Eugene Smith , known often under the diminutive familiar of Gene Smith , (1918 - 1978) was a American Photojournaliste , of which the rigor and the requirement made of it a model for many generations of photographers, attaches to the value of the testimony which photography allows.

Gene Smith was, in the literal sense of the term, which the Americans call a concerned photographer , an engaged photographer, who used his camera as a weapon to defend his ideas.

Biography

William Eugene Smith was one of the first and largest photo-reporters in the world. It covered intensely the face of the Second world war as well as the Concentration camps. After this immersion in the violence of the war, it moves away little by little from the photography of war to concentrate on the treatment of basic subjects.

In the Years 1950, it carries out many “photo-tests” for the American magazine Life magazine, while being immersed lengthily in the places or near the people whom it photographs. Among those, one can quote “ The spanish village ” (the Spanish village), “ Country doctor ” (Country doctor), “ Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné ” (Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné), “ Pittsburg . ”

In 1975, it was present at Arles, to show in preview, at the time of one evening full with emotion, with the International meetings of the photography of Arles, the three years result of work spent with his wife to document the consequences on the population of the Pollution to the mercury of bay of Minamata, Japan, by the rejections at sea of a chemical plant. A work strong, carried out not without difficulty, because of the threats and the aggressions of which it was the object on behalf of the bully boys with the service of the industrialists. It is during this report that it took very famous photography the Bath of Tomoko , become an icon of photography.

External bonds

• Its biography by Roland Quilici on the site Photophilic

Price in its honor

The Prix W. Eugene Smith is a prestigious price of the photo-report, created in its honneur.
• in 2004 , it returned to Stanley Greene of the Agence Considering for its report on the war as Chetchnia and for the project Chalk Lines: The Caucasus in connection with the republics of the Caucasus.

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