In April 2010, I attended a conference called “Mercury: A Hazard Without Borders” at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. I was drawn there by the appearance of Aileen Mioko Smith, Smith’s Japanese-American second wife and the co-author of their 1970s project that documented the tragic effects of corporate mercury pollution in the Japanese fishing village Minamata (the poison affected fetuses, leaving unharmed mothers with deformed babies). We had traded e-mails for years but had never met; she lives in Kyoto.
At the conference, Aileen gave a keynote speech, and an exhibition of twenty-five vintage Minamata prints by Gene Smith opened at the university’s Muscarelle Museum of Art. The show included ten more vintage prints from other parts of Smith’s career such as Pittsburgh, Albert Schweitzer, Haiti, and Smith’s children. Taken together, the work represented Smith’s ongoing intrigue with human hands, instruments of tenderness, creativity, and destruction.
The exhibition featured a stunning presentation of the greatest photograph of Smith’s career, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, a portrait of a mother bathing her deformed young daughter, an image compared by many to Michelangelo’s Pietà, with industrial critique layered in. By the time I began researching Smith in 1997, this image had been pulled from public circulation by Aileen, who owns the copyright for all of the Minamata materials, because of increasing pain expressed by Tomoko’s family from the public exposure of this photograph. It wasn’t meant for commercial calendars and postcards, not even for the aesthetic trial of museum walls. Not now, at least. I’d never seen a print of the image outside of Smith’s archive in Arizona. This conference’s emphasis on education and awareness, not art as object and commodity, allowed her to approve the inclusion of it.
A coincidence of circumstances at this exhibition that would be nearly impossible to reproduce again—the large size of the Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (the print measured twenty-five by forty inches), the spotlighted presentation of it, and my surprise to see it—caused me to be moved in a manner that I thought had been worn smooth by years of research. Or, perhaps, this was simply the best print of this image that I’d ever seen. In any case, I came away with a clearer understanding that Tomoko and her mother were in a very small room and how close Smith must have been standing to them in this devastating and tender scene; how much trust Tomoko’s mother must have felt toward him and Aileen; that, although Smith was in such poor physical condition in those years, he could manage to craft such a print; and that this print was the culmination of his life and work, all of his passions and interests along with darkroom techniques coming together in one printed picture. No need for a complicated sequence of images. This one would do. His life’s work was complete. It was okay for him to die now.
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Toward the end of the evening, Aileen and I walked out of the museum and sat down on the steps of a campus building across the street. She was fifty-nine years old at the time and could have passed for a woman at least a decade younger.
I first met Eugene in August 1970 when I walked into his loft on Sixth Avenue, Aileen told me. At the time, I was in college in California and I had a summer job with a Japanese film crew that had been hired by a big advertising agency in Japan and their client was Fuji film. I was the coordinator for this ad that would focus on two photographers, and Eugene was one of them. Fuji paid him two thousand dollars. At the time, he was involved in putting together a large retrospective exhibition of his work and I think he needed the money to finish that exhibition.
I walked into the loft with the Japanese gentlemen, and they immediately said what an honor it was to meet Eugene, et cetera. I was their translator. He looked at me and said, with a twinkle in his eye—he always had a twinkle in his eye—“What about you? Have you ever heard of me?” I said, “Noooo, I haven’t,” and we both smiled and laughed. That started the conversation.
For the next two days, we did the film work and he laid down his philosophy and his passion and his feelings, everything that he felt was important. He just set it out. The film crew wanted him to talk passionately and he did. He talked about photography and art and journalism and his belief in those things. And I was listening.
At the end of a couple of days, I realized his exhibition was deeply behind. It was going to be a six-hundred-print show called Let Truth Be the Prejudice, as you know, at the Jewish Museum. Today I still have some questions about that title; it doesn’t seem like the right title. Back then, I was naive. I didn’t even know that six hundred prints for a photography show was such a large number. I had just turned twenty. Eugene was fifty-one and he was very, very exhausted. He was very much in pain, physical pain from all the injuries he’d had in his life, war injuries, many operations.
I saw the situation and I immediately felt, “Oh, wow, somebody’s got to save this.” I later learned that in Eugene’s life there was always somebody that came along and found him and said, “Oh my God, I’ve got to help this person out.” I was just one among many that came along and felt that.
There were a number of other young people in their twenties helping him on this show. He announced that when he finished the show he would commit suicide. He saw this exhibition as the conclusion of his life and work. As it turned out, our work in Minamata was that conclusion. If I had been older when I met him, or if I’d been from a different family background, I’d have said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and left. But rather than go back to college in California, I stayed. Thanks to staying, though, I learned as much as I did.
In the loft at the time, he had about fifty sets of filthy bedsheets stuffed in corners, closets, and drawers all around the place. When sheets were dirty, he bought new ones, but he wouldn’t throw out the old ones. He’d just stuff them away somewhere. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do with them. We spent almost all the time in the darkroom. What comes to mind immediately are the red darkroom light and Dexedrine, which he always popped to keep awake; the all-nighters, the constant odor of hypo [a darkroom chemical], and McGregor scotch—he drank one bottle every day. There was always music—he played opera or jazz on the record player, always.
Eugene was incredibly inefficient. But if you look at his negatives, you can see a man with a very clear mind. There is a rhythm in his negatives as opposed to the chaos of his life. You can see him building to where he wants to be and actually getting there. He builds up to an image and then releases and winds down. There’s so much attention given to his printing—you know, printing while jazz or La Bohème is blasting on the stereo—and that’s valid. But he was very musical when he was shooting, too.
Aileen’s mother was Japanese and she was raised in Japan for several years as a kid. She said that Smith felt like he was from Japan in a former life. So when the couple traveled there in 1971, taking Let Truth Be the Prejudice with them, it was a “yearning for homecoming” for them both, she said.
Not long after the couple landed in Tokyo, they decided to embark on the project in Minamata. Smith’s long wish list of seventy-three projects that he gave John Morris upon joining Magnum in 1955 had included Portuguese and Japanese fishing villages as potential subjects. He would be able to check off one of the projects from the list with a book that was an instant classic in the history of photography and a landmark in global pollution awareness.
We got married and my first household as a wife was with Eugene in Minamata, she said, laughing. What a way to start my life as a wife. It wasn’t meant to last from the start. We spent seventy percent of our money on scotch for Gene, film, darkroom chemicals, and printing paper. Only thirty percent was for food and basic human needs.
Aileen and I talked for about an hour and we made tentative plans to meet each other in Minamata later that year. I had one last question for her: Did she write all of the text in the Minamata book?
Her breath seemed taken away. For the first time all day, in which she had been a sharp public figure at the conference, she looked open and shaken. She said, In all these years of talking about Minamata, nobody’s ever asked me that. She paused to gather herself.
You must understand, I’m not an artist. I never had goals of being an artist, not before Eugene or after. I was like his manager, just trying to get things completed, doing whatever had to be done.
That is why the Minamata project wasn’t another of Smith’s grand failures. Aileen wouldn’t put a number on the percentage of the Minamata project work—photos and words—that are hers. She’s listed as co-author and that says enough.
Aileen and Gene were together for four and a half years. The project was our baby, finishing the book kept us together that long, she said. She removed herself from intimacy with Smith more cleanly than most people did, before ordinary expectations of him took root, which probably explains why she remains sympathetic to him today, her memories unsparing while still caring for him, his legacy, and his family.
Smith received his greatest worldwide acclaim for the Minamata work in the few years before he died in 1978, traveling around Europe and the States soaking up the adulation. His archive is full of fan mail from that period, many young photographers gushing. In several interviews he admitted that Aileen made up to fifty of the photographs in the book. In his will, he left her ownership and copyright of those materials; the rest of his life’s work went to his estate.
Aileen later remarried and had a daughter who was born in 1985. For the past four decades, she’s been an international spokesperson and activist for antipollution initiatives.