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Eugene Smith's Spanish Village |
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05 Jun 2008 |
Eugene Smith’s seminal photo essay Spanish Village was the setting for
our first Photo Espana experience. One of six expertly curated Smith
exhibitions in the cool Teatro Fernan Gomez Centro de Arte, the
emotional tenor of Spanish Village virtually vibrates against the thick
walls. Smith’s wish to seek out an archetypal village, which would best
show the conditions of ordinary people’s lives, was fulfilled by
Deleitosa, Extremadura and its inhabitants. His more specific intention
– to block the American alliance with Franco – did not succeed and this
perceived failure was many of the many frustrations that would haunt
Smith throughout his restless life.
Of course the restlessness was also a contributing factor to Smith’s
undoubted genius. The Country Doctor and Nurse Midwife set the bar of
photojournalism so incredibly high, we wondered if anything else we
will see this week will be even half as interesting. Such was Smith’s
commitment to his work and his subjects that one caption indicated that
a dying child was receiving a blood transfusion from the photographer.
A Man of Mercy was the weakest link in this otherwise great show. Not
that this essay – on German Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer and his
missionary work in Africa – should have been omitted. In Smith’s
personal trajectory, it was a landmark, in that after his own layout
was rejected by Life magazine (not for the first time) he resigned
(later joining Magnum).
Smith’s obsessive layouts can be witnessed first hand in the Pittsburgh
exhibition, his first Magnum work, and an extraordinary poetical
evocation of a city and its rhythms. It is touches like this as well as
contact sheets that can be viewed through loup that make this show much
more than a thrown together retrospective.
The curator, Enrica Vigano, was keen to stress Smith’s strategy of
blurring the boundaries of actuality to get to the truth (demonstrated
by the two treatments of a picture of a Haitian man, a patient in an
asylum, one showing just his anguished face floating out of a sea of
blackness; while the original photograph showed people and objects in
the background). The question of whether photographs can or should show
reality or represent reality still underpins all discussions of
documentary photography.
In 1971, Smith embarked on his voyage to Minimata, Japan, to drive home
the realities of mercury poisoning in what was after all a man-made
environmental disaster. Did he need to manipulate his pictures to show
the ‘truth’ of this catastrophe? After spending an hour in the presence
of these acutely humane photographs, I was left feeling that the truth
of lived experience is what’s important: by any means necessary. But
then you have to question who is doing the doctoring (so beloved of the
Nazi regime). And the ‘right’ answer slips away like sand through your
hands.
W. Eugene Smith
Steelworker with Goggles, 1955
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith
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