Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

by Sam Stephenson Narrated by Coleen Marlo

Overview

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 archive, Sam Stephenson set out to research those who knew him from various angles. In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson revives Smith's life and legacy, merging traditional biography with highly untraditional digressions. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down 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 chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; and Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whom Smith recorded on surreptitious tapes.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"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

"[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

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

“Sam Stephenson’s earlier books on W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh and Jazz Loft projects have established him as the leading authority on defining parts of the photographer’s career. Now, in this gripping biography, Stephenson has extended his research to the whole of Smith’s turbulent life, adding greatly to our knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of his extraordinary work.” —Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment

Among the things I love about Sam Stephenson’s book Gene Smith’s Sink is that it’s the result of, and an artifact of, lyric research: research that ostensibly originates with a given subject or archive, but very quickly follows leads elsewhere. It’s a sort of wandering and associative research, and in this way has as much to do with poetry as it does “documentary” or “nonfiction.” Lyric research reminds us that the researcher, the writer, the speaker, is also the subject. But maybe more to the point when speaking about Stephenson's beautiful book, lyric research is a capacious mode of seeing, which seems appropriate, given the book’s occasion is the photographer Gene Smith. Given the book’s subject, ultimately, is looking. —Ross Gay, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award winner in poetry

“Sam Stephenson’s brave and wise book, both more and less than a biography, is a spare demonstration of a huge idea: that nothing is ever finished and nobody is really knowable. And so the roundabout way to know a difficult and extraordinary creator like W. Eugene Smith, or really anyone, may be the most effective and authentic way.” —Ben Ratliff, author of Every Song Ever

“Sound is more present in Gene Smith’s Sink than in any book I’ve ever read. In this deeply empathic book, the reader leans forward, listening, so that when the call of the chuck-will’s-widow occurs on Sixth Avenue, it can be heard. This stunning book resembles a Tennessee Williams play that obsessed Smith; it is the Camino Real of biographies.” —Margaret Bradham Thornton, editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks

“The elisions are bold and the detours central. Steadfastly refusing to either lionize or vilify W. Eugene Smith, Sam Stephenson achieves something of a different, more subtle order. What might have been a book about one man’s life is instead about many lives—human constellations no less interesting than the famous photographer’s (very) dark star. Stephenson’s twenty-year sojourn into Smith’s unique, desperately
obsessive leavings births a remarkable, deeply generous book.” —Jem Cohen, director of Museum Hours

“Gene Smith’s Sink is the story of a well-known photographer. It tells a lot about his working life and it tells a lot about his personal life. But what it tells best are things much more complicated. There are many revelations by which I saw a glimpse of what it is like to be a real photographer.” —Hiroshi Watanabe, photographer

Kirkus Reviews

2017-04-23
In a wildly digressive, unconventional biography, documentarian Stephenson (The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, 2009, etc.) reports on 20 years researching the life of W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978).In 1977, when Smith was evicted from his Manhattan loft, he saw 22 tons of material loaded onto a truck bound for the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Besides photographs, notebooks, and mounds of scrap paper, the shipment included 1,740 reels of tape, recordings of the many artists, musicians, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes who visited Smith, and "absurd oddities such as eight continuous hours of random loft sounds" and "myriad sounds from TV and radio." Those tapes prodded Stephenson to interview everyone he could track down, men and women now in their 70s and 80s, who had any connection, however peripheral, with Smith. A portrait emerges of a difficult, combative, selfish man, "a bipolar pack rat" addicted to alcohol and assorted drugs. "He drank a fifth of scotch and ate countless amphetamines every day," Stephenson reports. One psychiatrist deemed Smith's uncontrollable obsessions to be "very costly, very time consuming and draining for him and others around him." Famous in the 1940s and '50s for photographs produced for Life, Smith gave up that connection, left his wife and children destitute, and moved to Manhattan. Suffering from health problems, living in a filthy loft, and struggling financially, he nevertheless always found someone to rescue him, either with money or by managing the mess of his life. Stephenson includes capsule biographies of all his interviewees, along with overly long excerpts from the interviews. Toward the end of his research, in Japan, where Smith took his famous photograph of a mother and her deformed child in Minamata, Stephenson suddenly realized, with some embarrassment, the "absurd degree" to which he "was following Smith's footsteps." Readers may draw that conclusion quite early in the narrative. An obsessive reporter tracks an obsessive artist in a book for die-hard Smith fans.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170156078
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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