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Gene Smith's Sink

A Wide-Angle View

Sam Stephenson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374537895
ISBN13: 9780374537890

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224 Pages

$17.00

CA$20.50

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Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography’s most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.

When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read “stroke,” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything,” from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep.

Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith’s stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith’s Sink, Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith’s life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith’s Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer’s potent legacy and the subjects around him.

Reviews

Praise for Gene Smith's Sink

"Fascinating . . . evocative . . . For all that, the wayward individual that emerges out of Stephenson’s ambitious “wide angle” approach remains essentially unknowable, a blur in an otherwise sharply defined portrait of a tougher time and a truly bohemian milieu that already seems impossibly distant."—Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian

"We would understand . . . little of Gene Smith's legacy were it not for Stephenson's labors."—Vince Passaro, Harper's

"Stephenson has created a fantastic, experimental form for a revealing biographical sketch, taken from voices rarely heard . . . A great read."—Anthony Bannon, Buffalo News

"Compelling . . . Gene Smith's Sink is a haunting exploration of the photographic mind."—Shelf Awareness

"[A] far-reaching, insightful biography . . . Stephenson balances the history and the drama of Smith’s life in a skillful distillation of his expansive, careful research."—Publishers Weekly

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

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1

MEXICANA


On the night of Friday, April 21, 1939, Gene Smith went to the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre between Broadway and Eighth Avenue to photograph the opening of a new show. The assignment came through his agency, Black Star,...

About the author

Sam Stephenson

Sam Stephenson is a writer and documentarian. He is the author of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965. His writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Paris Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American. A lifelong resident of North Carolina, he lives in Durham with his wife and their son.

Kate Joyce