HERE is a spread of Smith’s WWII images in the London Daily Mail yesterday.  Thanks to Russell Burrows for the tip.

HERE is a piece I wrote last year for Paris Review about my trip following Smith’s footsteps in the Pacific.

-Sam Stephenson

Niece Lindsey Mockel, living in Portland, OR, tipped me on Smith show up on NPR’s The Picture Show blog today.

-S.S.

A recent New York Times photo blog post brought attention to my former office mate, Margaret Sartor.  While Margaret was working on her Gedney book, What Was True, I was working on Dream Street.  We sat about six feet apart and helped keep each other’s wits about us during those uneasy projects.  In my library those two books are side by side.  Margaret’s husband, Alex Harris, by the way, is the one largely responsible for sending me on the Gene Smith path fifteen years ago this month.  It could have been a cold, rainy day like today.  I was working part-time in Quail Ridge Books, struggling in grad school, wondering what was going on.  Alex, as editor of DoubleTake magazine, gave me a phone call and offered support for me to visit Smith’s archive in Arizona and research his unfinished Pittsburgh project for a piece.  And now look.  Good heavens.  Somebody make it stop.

-S.S.

Dave Simonton sent me a reminder note this morning.  Smith was born December 30, 1918.  I spent a few minutes rummaging for something unique that I’ve never posted before.  Then I figured I couldn’t do much better than to re-post these two images of Smith, the first of him and Larry Clark in the loft in 1962, by Gernot Newman, and the second of him in Wichita in 1977, the year before he died, by Terry Evans.  He was 59 when he died.  He’d be 93 today.

Larry Clark and Gene Smith in 821 Sixth Avenue, 1962. Photo by Gernot Newman.

Gene Smith in Wichita, 1977. Photo by Terry Evans.

-Sam Stephenson

~44 pounds.

“Someday I think you should come down and weigh my scrapbook.” -W. Eugene Smith

We have now heard all of the digitized audio material made from the tapes found in W. Eugene Smith’s collection. These notebooks hold the paper version of my notes as well as the contributions of fellow listeners Hank Stephenson, Will Harris, Beth Turner, Lauren Brenner, and Margaret Hennessey. Special thanks to these individuals for sharing in the discovery of Smith’s audio. And to Sam Stephenson, for creating the Jazz Loft Project and allowing me to hear this collection, in addition to sharing in the discovery of the wonders found in and beyond Smith’s recordings.  We are grateful for the support of our friends at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona Libraries as well as our friends here in Durham at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

This work would not have been possible without the generous support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation. Likewise, we are deeply grateful to the Heirs of W. Eugene Smith.

We are also thankful for crucial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammy Foundation), the Duke University Office of the Provost, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Ken and Amelia Jacob, and Kimpton Hotels.

Many people have contributed to this listening and cataloging work. In thinking of people to thank, the list begins to grow towards the size of the list of names of people who passed through the loft at 821 Sixth Avenue. And there is a good deal of overlap in these two lists. We are very fortunate and most thankful to have met and heard the stories of many who lived in, worked in, and visited this loft building.  And we are fortunate to collaborate with a wonderful community of partners, archivists, audio  engineers, colleagues, advisors, work study students, interns, friends, and fellow Rome builders. Thank you!

At this juncture, we are working with our partner institutions on the next steps in the prospect of archiving this enormous collection so  that it may be made available to the public in the future.

-Dan Partridge

Photo by Harlan Campbell.

Yesterday I had yet another inspiring conversation with the poet Betty Adcock.  Such conversations with her and her late husband Don Adcock have been the norm for me over the past fifteen years (I wrote about Don here).  I’m lucky.  This particular chat was about my growing efforts to go deep on Gene Smith’s background in Wichita, to learn what it was about his first eighteen years that he carried for the next forty.  We talked about John Keats and James Dickey, among others.  I told Betty I’d been reading the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, in particular his treatise on art, “In Praise of Shadows,” and his “Seven Japanese Tales,” which was recommended to me by novelist Allan Gurganus (I mentioned Tanizaki in a Paris Review piece here).  We ended up talking about the term “fixer,” in regard to the darkroom chemical, and also in regard to care giving and healing – themes that recurred in Smith’s work, and in regard to efforts to make solid shaky things in general.

Betty then pointed me toward a poem by her friend Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer Prize winner.  It’s called “Secure the Shadow” and I’ve read it six times in the past 24 hours.  I look forward to Claudia’s new book.

Check out Betty’s talk about Dickey here.  The talk provides a clear sense of her brilliance and humor.

-Sam Stephenson

Last night Larry Clark sent me this photograph of him and Gene Smith in 821 Sixth Avenue.  According to Larry it’s from 1962 and made by Gernot Newman.  Larry and Gernot had hitchhiked from Milwaukee to NYC during a holiday that year.  Larry found the picture earlier in the week while rummaging through some boxes.  He gave me permission to post it here.

-S.S.

Larry Clark and W. Eugene Smith, 821 Sixth Avenue, 1962. Photo by Gernot Newman.

Above is the title of a piece by John McPhee in the November 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.  Here’s a clip:

“For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere.  They just go by in a ceaseless stream.  Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing, what governs the choice?  I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college.  I checked off more than ninety per cent.”

McPhee’s passage helps explain why I’ve made three week-long trips to Gene Smith’s hometown of Wichita and why I may make one more before this manuscript is finished next year.  The passage also has me pondering what it is about my first eighteen years that led me to spend fifteen adult years researching Smith’s Pittsburgh, then his goings on at 821 Sixth Avenue, and now the full story.  It also may help explain why I picked up tennis last spring after a twenty-five year layoff and have played four days a week since then.  Who knows?

-Sam Stephenson

The following portrait of Gene Smith was made by Terry Evans in Wichita in 1977, on the occasion a retrospective exhibition.  It was the last visit he made to his hometown.   He died the following year at age fifty-nine, after two strokes.  Throughout his career he maintained an interest in human hands:  the handcraft of musicians in the JLP series, a variety of human expressions in others, from tenderness to outrage.  After re-examining her negative yesterday Terry told me Smith was holding a pen in this picture.  Before Terry’s revelation, photographer Kate Joyce, a friend of Terry’s from Chicago, suggested Smith was holding an “air” camera, like an air guitar.  I think they are both right.

Gene Smith in Wichita, 1977. Photograph by Terry Evans.

-S.S.

Two weeks ago I made my third visit to Gene Smith’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas.  The Ulrich Museum of Art organized another impressive week of events.  Their staff and patrons were generous and welcoming as usual.

With the help of Eric Cale, director of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum, I managed to go inside the house where Smith lived his first eight years with his parents and older brother.  Photographer Kate Joyce, who was also in town to give a couple of talks at the Ulrich, went with me.  You can see a sequence of her photographs below.

On Smith’s last visit to Wichita in 1977, a year before he died at age fifty-nine, this house at 1201 Woodrow St. was his priority, according to his companion at the time, photographer Sherry Suris, who made photographs of him inside the house and standing in the yard.   Smith didn’t visit the bigger home across the street on N. River Blvd. where his family moved in 1926 when he was eight.  This was where Gene’s father, William Smith, left one morning in April 1936, drove to a hospital parking lot and blew open his stomach with a shotgun.  Happier memories were in the Woodrow house; plus its windows were Smith’s first apertures.

The current residents of 1201 Woodrow are Reverend David Carter, a minister at a Unitarian Universalist church, and his wife Marguerite Regan, an English and writing instructor at Newman University.  They were gracious and accepting hosts for our exploration of their place.  Before becoming a minister David had worked with Roy DeCarava and others as a member of Kamoinge, a forum for African-American photographers in New York founded in 1963 and continuing today.  He and Marguerite were intrigued to learn that Smith had lived in their house as a young boy eighty-five years ago.

Back home in North Carolina last week, I mailed David and Marguerite a copy of the Jazz Loft Project book.  As I walked away from the post office in the back of the hardware store near the home where my wife and I have lived for thirteen of the fifteen years that I’ve been researching Smith, it occurred to me that I had just done something unusual:  I packaged my book about Smith’s New York City loft and addressed it to his first home in Wichita.  Both buildings face due east.  The Sixth Avenue loft had traffic running right to left in front of his window; the Wichita home had the Little Arkansas River running left to right.

The week culminated with a moving talk by photographer Terry Evans, whose exhibition ”Matfield Green Stories” was installed at the Ulrich.  A native of the Kansas plains, Terry has spent her life photographing places not unlike Smith’s paternal grandparents’ farm in Severy, an hour east of Wichita, which was memorable enough for Smith to mention in his book on Minamata, Japan forty years later.  At dinner after her talk, Terry’s husband Sam Evans, who has a background in the grain and banking industries in Kansas, gave me poignant insights into the pressures and customs Smith’s father would have experienced as a grain dealer and President of Wichita’s Board of Trade before and during the Depression.

In the second half of 2012 I’ll submit my manuscript for Gene Smith’s Sink to my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  I’m not sure if I’ll visit Wichita again before the manuscript is done.  But I’d like to return when the book is published.  Wichita and Japan loom large in the story.

Little Arkansas River Homage to Jun Morinaga's River: Its Shadow of Shadows.

Photographs by Kate Joyce.

-Sam Stephenson