Letter to the editor.

Dear Editor:

Jill Conner states in "Mining The Beautiful" (Afterimage May/June 2006) that"... as war photography became the style that was able to incur the most money, some artists like W. Eugene Smith ventured to stage war scenes within their studios and created false histories that fell into the realm of propaganda." This statement is quoting out of context, and its imputations are so opposite to the character of Smith and his role in the history of photojournalism that I feel compelled to offer a comment.

In the late 1930s illustrated journalism was divided into advertising photography, hard news photography, and editorial photojournalism. In the United States, editorial journalism was designed to provide photographic illustrations for magazine articles that were often scripted in advance by picture editors-sometimes to the level of shot-by-shot selection-even before the photographer went to photograph the event. These illustrated photo stories often had many of the same qualities of what we would call today a "docudrama"--and only the most naive reader would confuse them with hard reality news photos. As the U.S. drifted into World War II, virtually every magazine in the country began to practice "war preparedness" journalism. This was a form of propaganda designed to inform and instruct the citizenry of the U.S., as well as foreign allies and enemies, of the political and historical causes, events, and activities that had led to the conflict as well as to restate and reaffirm the values, ideals, and ideologies (democracy, freedom, and the belief that the rights of the individual should be balanced against the demands of the totalitarian state) that underpinned the American position as to why the country felt compelled to join the conflict. If you worked in journalism, your photographic assignments were some variant of this war preparedness practice--there simply was no other type of journalism practiced during the period. Throughout his early career, Smith practiced this form of photojournalism with great diligence as he, like everyone else, believed in stressing these values in the face of a threatening, militarily active form of totalitarian aggression. It was at this time that Smith (who then did not own a studio and would not have thought of himself as an artist, nor would have anyone else) made the type of image that Conner mentions.

During World War II, a civilian could not just waltz into a combat zone and begin to take photographs. When the war broke out, Smith was a successful and well-paid working editorial photojournalist and the lead staff photographer for Parade Magazine, a journal that was then considered an important member of the American illustrated press. But while he was making his living by shooting war preparedness photographs in the U.S. on such themes as "Why We Fight" or "Training Our Troops for War," he was desperately calling in every favor he could to be included in the very limited pool of foreign correspondents assigned to a combat theater of operations. Finally, in 1943, he was offered the position for Flying Magazine, a monthly hobbyist magazine that just through sheer chance had been assigned one of these rare combat zone correspondent positions with the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific. Smith left his family and a prestigious, lucrative job with a widely read illustrated weekly magazine to travel to a distant combat zone to photograph for a journal that might publish only half a dozen photographs each month. This move would have certainly been considered professionally suicidal, if not actually physically dangerous. But after overcoming American Naval officers' uncertainties and constraints about a civilian presence on their ships and in their planes, Smith flew in dozens of combat sorties and produced such extraordinary photographs of Naval combat that these images began to be widely seen throughout the U.S. in spite of their unprepossessing venue. Smith was then offered a job to cover military operations in the Pacific Theatre for LIFE magazine. During his first ground combat in the battle of Saipan, Smith had a life-altering experience that drove home to him both the real power of photographic images, and the danger of their potential misuse in the mass media. [See my article "Eugene Smith: Early Work," Center for Creative Pholography No. 12 (July 1980) or my "W.Eugene Smith: Master of the Photographic Essay," Aperture (1981)]. Smith photographed thirteen military campaigns from June 1944 until he was severely wounded by a mortar burst on Okinawa in May 1945. During these campaigns, he photographed in the heart of the major battles of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. His insistence on staying on the front lines with the combat soldiers was unprecedented--matched in photojournalist practice only by the equally extraordinary work of fellow LIFE staffer Robert Capa in Europe. (Smith was not expected, even by LIFE editors, to be in the middle of actual combat and most of his friends and colleagues attempted to persuade him to stop taking so many risks.)

Throughout all this Smith developed a personal sense of the importance of the veracity of his photographs to the events he photographed and defined a personal morality about this use of photography that ran counter to his own and the general acceptance of the earlier practice of war preparedness propaganda photography. Smith continued to fight after the war against the editorial misuse of his photographs, even at the risk of his life and professional career. This belief cost him a great deal in every way, but it was one that he held throughout most of his life. In fact, the are of Smith's career is defined by his stubborn insistence that his and others' photographs be used properly in magazines.

WILLIAM S. JOHNSON 

Rochester, New York 

Jill Conner responds:

While "Mining the Beautiful" intended to explain how grotesque images could be beautiful, it also charted the evolution of the grotesque within American photography from pre-World War II to the present.

As cited in my article, Keith Davis described Smith's challenging career as a war photographer thus: "The young W. Eugene Smith, for example, simulated combat scenes by posing himself and his assistant as soldiers, and timing his exposure to the detonation of a carefully placed charge of dynamite" (255). However Carol Squiers's catalogue raisonne for the International Center of Photography's exhibition "The Body at Risk" went into much more detail:

  The realization that LIFE was the only place to be in a time of war--
  and that [Smith] probably made a mistake in refusing a new contract
  with the magazine-brought on nightmares, depression, and suicidal
  thoughts. Until 1944, Smith worked for Collier's, Parade, and Ziff-
  Davis magazines including Flying, none of which were influential
  enough to gain him access to ground combat. At Parade, in fact, most
  of the war stories were simulated. For one tale, Smith and a Parade
  reporter set up a battle scene using hundreds of pounds of dynamite
  for effect and posing as soldiers themselves. Smith ended up with a
  concussion, dizziness, pain in his left arm, ringing in one ear, and a
  worsening of a speech impediment from standing too close to the
  explosions (74).

Smith undoubtedly made an immense contribution to the field of documentary photography. However, when I came across the conflict that he found himself in within the economics of making a living as a photographer, I felt compelled to include this in my article in order to point out the narrow parameters that photographers found themselves in at that point.