On September 2, 1958, Gene Smith’s passport was stamped in Geneva, Switzerland. He had been hired by General Dynamics to photograph the United Nations International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, known as “Atoms for Peace.” He was to be paid $2,500 for two weeks of work, plus a $280 per diem. Commercial work wasn’t Smith’s preference, but he needed the money. He needed some distance from New York, too.
A week later, on September 9, Smith’s long-awaited extended essay on the city of Pittsburgh hit newsstands. He had staked his reputation on the work. Two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships (the first one coinciding with Robert Frank’s fellowship for the work that became The Americans) further raised expectations. After Smith turned down $20,000 from both Life and Look magazines when they would not agree to his demands for editorial control, Popular Photography offered to put thirty-six pages of their 1959 annual at his disposal for $3,500. Smith accepted.
Now the anticipated magnum opus was set to arrive. But rather than stick around to toast his achievement, Smith jetted to Geneva. He had anticipated a Pittsburgh flameout earlier that summer, in a letter to his uncle Jesse Caplinger: “The seemingly eternal, certainly infernal Pittsburgh project—the sagging, losing effort to make the first of its publication forms so right in measure to the standards I had set for it.”
Less than a week after the annual appeared, the influential photographer and editor Minor White wrote a letter to John Morris at Magnum to complain about the waste of prime space given to the Pittsburgh spread. “Gene doesn’t have proper training in layout,” White wrote. Jacob Deschin, writing in The New York Times, was more charitable, calling the Pittsburgh essay a “personal triumph” for Smith and an “intensely personalized, deeply felt document.” He wrote, “Mr. Smith uses layout as an additional means of communicating his impressions of the city’s varied facets, its human and physical qualities … The approach is poetic, evoking the city’s character, the atmosphere of its everyday life, recalling the past and pointing up some of the bright signs of the future.”
But Deschin also cited the spread’s challenges: “Some readers may object to the details of the layout, such as the use of small pictures, rather than fewer and larger.” Smith had crammed eighty-eight images into thirty-six pages, along with a not insignificant amount of text. Additionally, the trim size of the Photography Annual was 8.5 x 11, compared with 11 x 14 at Life, where he had spent the last twelve years. His desire for meditative visual sequences had outstripped the available format.
Two years earlier in Pittsburgh, Smith had met a young avant-garde filmmaker named Stan Brakhage, who had been hired to make a film commemorating the city’s bicentennial. The two artists hit it off. Each admired the other’s dedication and belief in the power of seeing, which, they both thought, was so often tainted by commercial pressures, popular culture, and human fears. Brakhage used Smith’s stills in his cut of the film (a cut never released and unavailable today; another director finished the film), and his cinematic philosophies spurred new ideas for Smith’s Pittsburgh layouts.
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In Geneva, Smith shared a chalet with Brakhage, who was also there to document “Atoms for Peace.” They attended the conference by day and shared scotch and conversation by night. Smith craved the fertile, boundless, uncompromising engagement offered by twenty-five-year-old Brakhage, who in 1958 had completed the film Anticipation of the Night, which he’d considered ending with the scene of his own suicide, a thought that I imagine would have thrilled Smith.
The true impact of the relationship between Smith and Brakhage, though, can only be speculated. In June 2003, I was at a café in Santa Monica with Carole Thomas, Smith’s girlfriend with whom he shared his Sixth Avenue loft from 1959 to 1968. Gene was obsessed with this avant-garde filmmaker who used to come over to the loft, she told me, but she couldn’t remember his name.
A few years later, my colleague Dan Partridge found several minutes of recorded sound among Smith’s loft tapes, in which Smith can be heard reading from a 1963 writing by Brakhage: How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? I called Carole Thomas. She confirmed that the filmmaker she couldn’t remember before was indeed Brakhage. I reached out to Brakhage’s first wife, Jane Wodening, and to his widow, Marilyn Brakhage, both of whom confirmed the friendship between Smith and Brakhage but could not recall much else. Years passed. I moved on to other areas of research. Then, in 2014, a May 1970 letter from Brakhage to Smith was found in the Brakhage archive in Boulder, Colorado, then the original in the Smith archive in Tucson. It was signed only “Stan” and is mostly a rave about Smith’s 1969 Aperture monograph. The letter included this line:
Wonderful how clearly your face comes to me the instant I type your name—your face … its particular intensity: and then I have a shift of backgrounds including the kitchen in that damn Swiss chalet, the nightmarish Atoms For Peace circus, and then most happily your loft in N.Y.—your face remaining a constant thru all this, weathering these scenes with an etch of grace: see, I’ve almost got a motion picture portrait out of these memories.
Smith returned from Switzerland embarrassed by Pittsburgh but emboldened to go even further with his ideas for sequencing still images. He embarked on a two-volume, 350-page retrospective book that eventually contained 450 photographs spanning his career to that point. It became known, properly, as The Big Book. It could also have been called The Unpublishable Book. The dummy or maquette existed only in Smith’s archive until an extraordinary facsimile of it was published in 2013 by the University of Texas Press and Smith’s archive in Arizona.
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Brakhage felt that words deadened the senses; the majority of his films are silent.
In his 1982 talk “Impossible Stories,” the filmmaker Wim Wenders says, “In the relationship between story and image, I see the story as a kind of vampire trying to suck all the blood from an image. Images are acutely sensitive; like snails they shrink back when you touch their horns. They don’t have it in them to be the cart horses, carrying and transporting messages or significance or intention or a moral. But that’s precisely what a story wants from them.”
Wenders’s concern for the image helped me articulate my evolving feelings about Smith over the twenty years I have been studying his life and work. When Smith resigned from Life in early 1955, he also gave up journalism once and for all. In Pittsburgh, Brakhage’s silent films impressed Smith. His work moved further beyond journalism than ever, further beyond story, toward image and poetry. But he couldn’t shake the need for story in his public presentation. As a result, he strangled his extraordinary, lyrical Pittsburgh images with sentences. In one section comparing the most exclusive private club in Pittsburgh to a union beer joint, he added these words: “Yet at the core, down at the coiling depths of pulse and instinct, what difference here except in furnishing?” I want to shake Smith. Hey, man, just let the images breathe.
In contrast, The Big Book contains no text. It opens with tender pictures of children, including Smith’s own, and closes with brutal images of carnage on the front lines of World War II. In between there are some two dozen of his iconic images from Life, and many more that are rarely, if ever, published in Smith monographs, including some of the most abstract and ephemeral work of his career, all woven together with no concern for chronology, subject, or theme. Images from “Country Doctor” and “Nurse Midwife,” for example, aren’t confined to discrete sections. Journalism was thrown out the window. There was also no concern for making commodities of individual photographs, a growing trend in the art world at that time. What matters most in The Big Book are shapes and rhythms, patterns of tones, and an underlying sense of the foibles of human culture—the hungry, blind march toward death, often at the political and economic hands of fellow humans. These are all ideas Smith and Brakhage would have discussed during those long nights in the Swiss chalet. The Big Book represents Smith’s most fully formed ideas for layout. Unrestrained by the strictures of print journalism, rejuvenated by Brakhage, Smith produced what would be the pinnacle of his sequential aesthetic.
In addition to Brakhage, The Big Book achievement owes much to Carole Thomas, who wandered into Smith’s life as a soft-spoken, eager, and brilliant art student in 1959 and stayed for nine years. Only eighteen years old, she already had a background in theater design, which made her the perfect partner for Smith, who often claimed theater was his most important influence, not photography. Thomas adopted Smith’s dedication to The Big Book. She became the thoughtful sounding board he needed in order to finish projects at this stage in his life. Her aptitude can be heard in darkroom conversations recorded on Smith’s tapes. She also became a masterful darkroom printer in her own right. Thomas was integral to Smith’s achieving the most audacious product of his career. It would be her unseen opus, too.