cover image Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View

Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View

Sam Stephenson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (208p) ISBN 978-0-374-23215-3

Stephenson’s clear fascination with documenting the life of photographer Eugene Smith (1918–1978) and his equally clear expertise of Smith’s oeuvre combine to produce this far-reaching, insightful biography. Stephenson (The Jazz Loft Project) reveals Smith as a cinematic, theatrical, poetic photographer. Smith was also a pack rat who thrived on urgency, risk, nerves, and the desire to destroy to create anew. In seven distinct sections made up of brief, energetic chapters, the biographer chronicles his own journey into Smith’s expansive archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, examining hundreds of thousands of negatives, worksheets, and prints as well as notebooks, correspondence, vinyl records, and books. Over 500 interviews with Smith’s friends, assistants, students, lovers and even those indirectly connected Smith, such as the son of Dr. Ernest Ceriani, profiled in Smith’s seminal 1948 essay, “Country Doctor,” provide a complex, multi-perspective view of the subject. Stephenson balances the history and the drama of Smith’s life in a skillful distillation of his expansive, careful research. (Aug.)