From the book "Understanding A Photograph" by John Berger. On understanding W. Eugene Smith.
"He was not a cultivated man for this implies belonging to a privileged culture. He was a loner. He sought a truth which, by its nature, was not evident. It was waiting to be revealed by him and him alone. He wanted his images to convert so that spectator might see beyond the lies, the vanity, the illusions of everyday life. In this profound sense of searching for the immanent truth he was, I believe, the most religious photographer in the history of the art. A seer in both the photographic and biblical senses of the term."
"His unique use of black and white was intimately tied to his sense of vocation. Through blackness he makes the world his own--turns it int a dark, terrible, moral theatre where souls search for beauty or redemption.....Black, for Smith, was the valley of the shadow of death. Light was hope"
"How is it that a man as pathologically egocentric as Eugene Smith, and as obsessively selfish as he often was, how is that he could produce some of the most deeply human photographs of our time?"
"He was not a cultivated man for this implies belonging to a privileged culture. He was a loner. He sought a truth which, by its nature, was not evident. It was waiting to be revealed by him and him alone. He wanted his images to convert so that spectator might see beyond the lies, the vanity, the illusions of everyday life. In this profound sense of searching for the immanent truth he was, I believe, the most religious photographer in the history of the art. A seer in both the photographic and biblical senses of the term."
"His unique use of black and white was intimately tied to his sense of vocation. Through blackness he makes the world his own--turns it int a dark, terrible, moral theatre where souls search for beauty or redemption.....Black, for Smith, was the valley of the shadow of death. Light was hope"
"How is it that a man as pathologically egocentric as Eugene Smith, and as obsessively selfish as he often was, how is that he could produce some of the most deeply human photographs of our time?"
