On April 30, 1936, a day before his life insurance policy expired, Gene Smith’s father drove to a hospital parking lot two miles from their home on the riverbank and blew open his stomach with a shotgun. Suicides made news on a weekly basis in Kansas at the time, sometimes daily, but the brief stories were usually buried in small print in the back of the paper, like classified ads. William Smith’s headlines were on the front page above the fold of both daily papers. Seventeen-year-old Gene graduated from high school a month later.
Smith dropped out of Notre Dame and moved to New York to become a full-time professional photographer. Over the next forty years, until his death in 1978, Smith returned to Wichita only a handful of times, and in the voluminous tape recordings from his Sixth Avenue loft, he talks about his father’s suicide only once. He called it a “relief,” because he could see his father being crushed under the weight of economic and social pressures.
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Nabokov once wrote that probing his childhood was “the next best thing to probing one’s eternity.” I can see that. But what about probing someone else’s childhood, someone long dead? Rather than my memory or other people’s memories (there aren’t many alive today who can attest to Smith’s childhood in Wichita), I’m probing faint footprints, artifacts, news clippings. Whatever I can find.
In Henry James’s preface to The Aspern Papers, he refers to a principle I’ve found pertinent in my years researching Smith: “That odd law,” James writes, “which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.” Which one am I—the historian or the dramatist?
During my 2011 visit to Wichita, I followed Smith’s trail to the sanctuary of St. Mary’s Cathedral, where he had been an altar boy—he attended the Cathedral School through the eleventh grade. I found his tenth-grade 1934 Cathedral School yearbook in a moldy archive room, the lightbulbs burned out. I propped open the door to get enough light, using the flashlight on my phone.
Construction on the cathedral was completed in 1912—the facilities manager told me the majestic sanctuary hadn’t changed since. I stood in the back and looked toward the altar. Smith had walked down the center aisle wearing a white robe, carrying lit candles and gold crosses that were several feet taller than him. The natural lighting in the vaulted room was spectacular. Pockets of near-blackness were offset by light streaming through stained-glass windows. The lit spaces were cradled by shadows, creating patterns that directed my eye.
The cathedral sanctuary called to mind the 1933 treatise on aesthetics In Praise of Shadows by the Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, who wrote, “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s end.”
The lighting in the sanctuary unmistakably resembled a vintage Smith print—the African-American nurse-midwife birthing a baby in rural, poverty-stricken South Carolina in 1951, or the mother bathing her deformed child in pollution-ravaged Minamata in 1971. Using his idiosyncratic darkroom shading techniques, Smith visually swaddled and caressed these two caregivers, innocent, he felt, in a way he wasn’t. He exalted them, loved them, created odes to them. Another of his most famous photographs is of a woman spinning yarn in his 1951 project “Spanish Village.” She, too, is caressed by shadows as she carefully performs her craft.
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Smith was born in Wichita in 1918. Between 1900 and 1930, Wichita’s population grew almost fivefold, from 24,000 to 110,000. It was a pioneer town. With few binding traditions and conventions, anything could happen. People could move there from the farm and take risks. They called it Magic City.
His father owned a grain business and was elected president of Wichita’s Board of Trade; his mother, Nettie, was a photographer, and she kept a darkroom in the house. Young Gene started photographing early, and as a teenager he made pictures for the local papers, cruising around town in the family station wagon with the words “W. Eugene Smith, Photographer” painted on the side.
I once stayed in a bed-and-breakfast a block from Smith’s childhood homes in the Riverside neighborhood on the bank of the Arkansas River. It was a quiet, well-to-do suburb in Smith’s day. Susan Nelson, mother of the novelist Antonya Nelson, grew up down the street from the Smiths. She described to me a friendly place where nobody locked doors and it was okay to borrow books from neighbors’ shelves without asking, as long as you returned them when you were finished.
Smith’s first apertures were the windows of his two homes, the first on Woodrow Street and then a larger, second one across Woodrow on North River Boulevard, a block and a half away. Both houses had unobstructed frontal views of the Arkansas River, which is dammed now, but would then have flowed left to right in young Gene’s field of vision as he peered over the windowsill, or when he stood on the bank amid the odor of wild onions and the sound of crickets. Both houses faced due east, the sun rising over the river in front.
Two decades later, his dank commercial loft on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan also faced due east. He lived there from 1957 to 1971, longer than anywhere after he left Wichita. He made twenty thousand photographs out the fourth-floor window of that loft, with traffic moving below, a constant flow from both directions (Sixth Avenue was made one-way later). Like in Riverside, people wandered into the loft unannounced. This time thieves and junkies often walked off with his things and pawned them.
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In 2010, on my first trip to Smith’s hometown, there was a tornado warning at three o’clock in the afternoon. For about twenty minutes, the sky turned as dark as night. It poured rain, there was violent thunder and lightning, then, just as quickly, it was all over—daylight glistened on the wet streets. The extreme changes from light to dark to light again resembled Smith’s trademark chiaroscuro print shading.
Walker Percy, another Catholic-bred artist, has written that severe weather can make people feel more alive and communal than usual. People secretly enjoy bad storms, he said; the danger can be invigorating, a rallying cry, and offers a connection with others. He also thought the urgency could be an antidote to clinical depression. Smith fed off risk and nerves for the rest of his life, noticeable early with his cavalier photo work in combat zones in the Pacific theater of World War II, and he fell into deep depressions when the urgency wasn’t there.
A bipolar pack rat, Smith revered a simplicity he saw in others that he couldn’t achieve himself. Sometimes, on his tape recordings, you can hear him talk about the danger of the firetrap loft building in Manhattan burning down, of the relief of losing everything and starting over. But had that happened, I think to myself, what would I have done for the past twenty years?