Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith is photography's most celebrated humanist. During his reign as a photo-essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of jazz musicians, disasters, doctors, and midwives revolutionized the role that image-making played in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.



In 1997, lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith's stupefying archiv...