TEL AVIV.- Already in his lifetime, Eugene Smith was recognized as one of the ten greatest American photographers of the 20th century and became a major influence for generations of photographers to come. To this day, his work is considered the pinnacle of “humanistic photojournalism”, as it manifests his exceptional political and social devotion and his notion of fulfilling a social-historical mission.

Smith developed and refined the photo essay into an interpretive narrative sequence, which is both endowed with emotion and dramatic richness and strives to attain a synthesis of the written message and the form and content of the photo. He wanted to do away with the conventional approach of using pictures as mere illustrations accompanying the text, wanting instead to give greater emphasis to the pictures themselves.

Alongside the dramas Smith chose to capture on film, his own life story was full of injuries and emotional, professional and financial crises. Having constantly struggled to gain recognition of his artistic independence, he became both the hero of the establishment and its victim.

Smith was born in 1918, in Kansas and began taking pictures at an early age. At 21, he joined the staff of Life Magazine. During the Second World War, he was a war correspondent covering the pacific theater, where he was severely injured. In 1957, after joining the Magnum photo agency as a freelance photographer – which often meant living on the brink of starvation and being unable to provide for his family – Smith left his wife and children and moved into a New York loft, which he rarely left. All the pictures he took during these years were of the sights visible from his window, his bustling life in his Sixth Avenue loft and, most of all, his encounters with famous Jazz musicians.

His final well known project was in Minamata, Japan – a collaboration with his second wife, Aileen. Smith documented the fight against a powerful company, whose chemical plant has been dumping mercury into the water of the bay, devastating the local eco-system and impacting the lives of hundreds of the inhabitants of this fishing town, whose livelihood depended on the bay.

Smith was injured and sick when he returned from Japan. Concerned for the fate of his vast archives, he submitted them to the care of the “Center for Creative Photography” at the University of Arizona. He died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 59.

Smith, a man of contradictions whose life oscillated between compassion and cruelty, altruism and egotism, truth and lies and mostly, as his photos reveal, black and white, gave paramount importance to his integrity and that of his subjects and to his ability to identify with them. This man, who gave his utmost to his projects and would spends days on end in the dark room, believed that the photographer must be as close as possible to the subjects of his art and even live among them. His immutable conscience was the compass that steered his professional life. “Humanity is worth more than a picture of humanity”, he once said.

Since 1980, the international Center of Photography in New York has been awarding a bi-yearly scholarship in his name.