Gene Smith`s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, Stephenson Sam

An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith

Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photographys most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and 50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.

When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read stroke, but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of everything, from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep.

Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smiths stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smiths Sink, Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smiths life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smiths Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographers potent legacy and the subjects around him.