Editor's Note: Wide World. Let me tell you about a photo that hangs in my house. It was taken by W. Eugene Smith, and its title is “The Walk to Paradise Garden.” It shows his two young children, hand in hand, on a dirt path in the woods, emerging from shadows into the light of a clearing. It reminds me of myself as a young boy exploring the wilderness of my backyard in southwestern Oregon. My backyard had this: my favorite black walnut tree, deer tracks, a hornet’s nest, squirrels. W. Eugene Smith photographed “The Walk to Paradise Garden” in 1946.
Photo: W. I would wander its seven acres, hoping to see a cougar (I never did). There is another layer to Smith’s photograph that also speaks to the power of exploration. “I followed my children into the undergrowth ... You will read in these pages about explorers who go to the deepest, coldest, highest places on Earth and beyond, but the truth is that exploration is as near as your backyard—and it can be profoundly life affirming.
In the Darkroom with W. Eugene Smith, Sam Stephenson. James Karales, Lower East Side, New York, 1969, black-and-white photograph, 13 1/2 X 16 5/8 inches. In early March of 1955, W. Eugene Smith steered his overstuffed station wagon into the steel city of Pittsburgh. He’d been on the road all day, leaving that morning from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he lived in a large, comfortable house with his wife and four children, plus a live-in housekeeper and her daughter. He was thirty-six, and a fuse was burning inside him. A hundred and eighty miles southwest of Pittsburgh, in Athens, Ohio, James Karales was finishing up a degree in photography at Ohio University.
Smith returned to Croton in late August with about eleven thousand negatives. Meanwhile, Karales, fresh out of school, had moved to New York to seek work as a professional photographer. Karales took a train to Croton that same day. Forty years later I visited Karales, who was still living in Croton with his wife, Monica. Sam Stephenson is at work on a biography of W. Photographer W. Eugene Smith’s unseen opus, Sam Stephenson. On photographer W. Eugene Smith’s unseen opus. On September 2, 1958, W. Eugene Smith’s passport was stamped at the airport in Geneva, Switzerland.
Hired by General Dynamics, he was there to photograph the United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, known as “Atoms for Peace.” He was to be paid $2,500 for two weeks of work (about $20,000 in 2014 money), plus a $20 per diem. Commercial work wasn’t Smith’s preference, but he needed the money. He needed some distance from New York, too. A week later, on September 9, Smith’s long-awaited extended essay on the city of Pittsburgh hit newsstands in Popular Photography’s Photography Annual 1959.
Now the anticipated magnum opus was set to arrive. Smith wasn’t the only one who disapproved. But Deschin also cited the spread’s challenges: “Some readers may object to the details of the layout, such as the use of small pictures, rather than fewer and larger.” In connecting dots between Smith and Brakhage, that’s all that I’ve found. W. Eugene Smith's 'Big Book,' His Way. "W. Eugene Smith's Caregiving Photo-Essays," By Sam Stephenson. Nurse Midwife Maude Callen 1951 | W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Photo Essay, ‘Nurse Midwife’ In December 1951, LIFE published one of the most extraordinary photo essays ever to appear in the magazine.
Across a dozen pages, and featuring more than 20 of the great W. Eugene Smith’ pictures, the story of a tireless South Carolina nurse and midwife named Maude Callen opened a window on a world that, surely, countless LIFE readers had never seen — and, perhaps, had never even imagined. Working in the rural South in the 1950s, in “an area of some 400 square miles veined with muddy roads,” as LIFE put it, Callen served as “doctor, dietician, psychologist, bail-goer and friend” to thousands of poor (most of them desperately poor) patients — only two percent of whom were white.
Calling Maude Callen a heroic figure — especially today, when the word “hero” is thrown around like confetti — might strike some as problematic. She was, after all, not really risking her life in her daily and nightly rounds. After Maude Callen arrived at 6 p.m., Alie Cooper’s labor grew more severe. For W. Classic: Eugene Smith's 'Country Doctor' - Photo Gallery.
W. Eugene Smith – “The Life and Work of Photographer W. Eugene Smith” (2010.