W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery November 19, 2007 - March 20, 2008

W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) was one of the 20th century's pre-eminent photographers. He was revered by colleagues for his idealistic vision and belief that his work could be a vehicle for truth and social justice. As a war photographer, Smith covered the Pacific campaign for two years until he was seriously wounded by an enemy mortar shell in 1945. After a year long recuperation, Smith began to work again and developed a new kind of magazine story that gave equal importance to text and photographs. Called a photo-essay, Smith used it to create a series of stories for Life magazine that, among others, profiled the life of a country doctor in Colorado and the travails of nurse midwives in Pineville, South Carolina. Smith left Life in 1954 citing creative differences and signed on with the Magnum Photo Agency. He handled a number of assignments for Magnum, the most important of which was a photo-essay of Pittsburgh that the artist expanded far beyond the project's original scope. Those pictures came to consume Smith to the point where he rejected many assignments because of his single minded promotion of the Pittsburgh work. Smith continued to take commercial assignments on a variety of subjects until his untimely death in 1978.