W. Eugene Smith: More Real than Reality

The exhibition includes over 200 images from the most emblematic series taken for Life magazine in the 1940’s and 1950’s and the projects Pittsburgh and Minamata. A full review of the series Country Doctor, Nurse Midwife, A man of Mercy and Spanish Village is made.

W. Eugene Smith is one of the main figures in humanist photography and his career centred on his obsession with the truth, resulting in passionate, idealistic, sensitive and optimistic images. As a photojournalist, between 1946 and 1954, he made some fifty projects for Life magazine, known as Photographic Essays. After having left the magazine, Smith carried out extensive independent projects such as Pittsburgh (1955–1957), for which he took more than 10,000 photos, and Minamata (1971–1975), about the chemical contamination of the population in that Japanese island.

These two exhaustive projects are – together with the photo essays made for Life: Country Doctor, Nurse Midwife, A Man of Mercy and Spanish Village – the heart of the W. Eugene Smith. more real than reality exhibition, a comprehensive review in over two hundred photographs of the work of a creator of emotionally intense and photographically spectacular images.

W. Eugene Smith (U.S.A. 1918–1978) was self trained. At the age of nineteen, he began to collaborate with Newsweek and a year later with Life, Look, Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Times. He left Life in 1955 and joined Magnum Photos. Along with his photographic work, he was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. His photographs have been shown in the most important art institutions, including the MoMA in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute in Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.