William Eugene Smith (1918-1978) was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Smith graduated from Wichita High School North in 1936. He began his career by taking pictures for two local newspapers, the Eagle and the Beacon. He went to New York City and began work for Newsweek and became known for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939. He soon resigned from Life and was wounded in 1942 while simulating battle conditions for Parade magazine.

As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and then Life again, Smith entered World War II on the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, Smith continued at Life and perfected the photo essay from 1947 to 1954. In 1950, he was sent to the UK to cover the General Election, in which Labour, under Clement Attlee, were victorious. Life had actually taken a editorial stance against the Labour government, but Smith's essay was very sympathetic to Attlee. In the end, a limited number of Smith's photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life.

Smith severed his ties with Life again over how the magazine used his photos of Albert Schweitzer. Starting from his project to document Pittsburgh, he began a series of book-length photo essays in which he strove for complete control of his subject matter. Complications from his consumption of drugs and alcohol led to a massive stroke, from which Smith died in 1978.

Today, Smith's legacy live on through the W. Eugene Smith Fund to promote "humanistic photography," which has since 1980 awarded photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.

Notable photographs

• (1944) photograph in which a wounded infant is found by an American soldier on Saipan
• (1945) photograph in which Marines blow up a Japanese blockhouse on Iwo Jima
• "The Walk to Paradise Garden" (1946) single photo of his two children walking hand in hand towards a clearing in woods.
• "Country Doctor" (1948) photo essay on Dr. Ernest Ceriani in the small Colorado town of Kremmling. Credited as the first "photo story" of the modern photojournalism age.
• Spanish Village (1950) photo essay on the small Spanish town of Deleitosa.
• "Nurse Midwife" (1951) photo essay on midwife Maude Callen in South Carolina.
• A Man of Mercy (1954) photo essay on Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa.
• "Pittsburgh" (1955) year-long project on the city, hired initially by photo editor Stefan Lorant for a three-week assignment.
• Haiti 1958-1959 photo essay on a psychiatric institute in Haiti.
• Minamata 1971-1975 long-term photo essay on the effects of mercury poisoning ("Minamata disease") in the fishing village of Minamata (Kumamoto, Japan). The best known single photograph is Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, an image of a mother bathing her daughter who was poisoned by mercury. This has been withdrawn from circulation in accordance with the parents' wishes.Withdrawal: Sam Stephenson, W. Eugene Smith 55 (London: Phaidon, 2001), 14.

Notes