W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist widely regarded as a founder of the modern photo essay, most of his major work appearing in Life magazine from the 1940s through the 1950s. His essays, including Country Doctor and Nurse Midwife, followed a single subject over an extended period to build an intimate, narrative portrait rather than a single dramatic image, and his insistence on controlling the editing and layout of his own work brought him into frequent conflict with his editors. In the 1970s he and his wife Aileen Mioko Smith spent years documenting the victims of mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan, producing a body of work that became one of the most influential examples of photography used as an instrument of social and environmental justice. Smith's technical mastery of the darkroom and his uncompromising devotion to a subject shaped how photojournalism was practiced for decades afterward.