W.Eugene Smith

Biography

Born and reared in Wichita, Kansas, W. Eugene Smith became interested in photography at the age of fourteen, and three years later had begun to photograph for local newspapers. He received a photography scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, but he left after a year for New York, where he joined the staff of Newsweek and freelanced for LIFE, Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, and other publications. Beginning in 1939, Smith began working sporadically as a staff photographer for LIFE, with which he had a tempestuous relationship throughout the rest of his career.

During World War II he was a war correspondent in the Pacific theater for the Ziff-Davis publishing company and LIFE, for whom he was working when he was severely wounded in Okinawa in 1945. After a two-year recuperation, he returned to the magazine and produced many of his best photo essays, including “Country Doctor,” “Spanish Village,” and “A Man of Mercy.” In 1955, he joined Magnum, the international cooperative photography agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour), and began work on a large photographic study of Pittsburgh, for which he received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1956 and 1957. Smith continued to freelance for LIFE, Pageant, and Sports Illustrated, among other periodicals, for the rest of his career. From 1959 to 1977, he worked for Hitachi in Japan and taught at the New School for Social Research and the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of Arizona in Tucson. His last photo essay, “Minamata,” completed in the 1970s, depicted victims of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village.

Country Doctor

A project by W. Eugene Smith. One of his most iconic works. In this project, Smith documented the life and work of Dr. Ernest Ceriani, a dedicated general practitioner in Colorado. Smith spent 23 days with Dr. Ceriani, capturing the challenges, triumphs, and the emotional toll of being a rural doctor.

Through his photographs, Smith beautifully portrayed the intimate moments between Dr. Ceriani and his patients, showcasing the deep connection and trust that existed between them. The project highlighted the importance of accessible healthcare in rural communities and shed light on the sacrifices made by doctors like Dr. Ceriani.

Smith’s photographs from the “Country Doctor” project were published in Life magazine in 1948 and gained widespread recognition. The project remains a powerful example of the impact that photojournalism can have in telling meaningful stories and raising awareness about important issues.

The “Country Doctor” project by W. Eugene Smith can be used as a source of inspiration for producing my own photographic response with a focus on photojournalism. Smith’s work showed the power of capturing real-life moments and telling compelling stories through images. To create my own photographic response, I can start by finding a subject or a theme that resonates with me, this being my fathers connection the the ocean. I can spend time observing and immersing myself in the subject, just like Smith did with Dr. Ceriani. When producing my response I am going to focus on capturing authentic moments and emotions. Looking for the details that tell a story and convey the essence of my subject through my images.

Yoshikatsu Fujii, a third-generation atomic bomb survivor born and raised in Hiroshima. Yoshikatsu Fujii is a photo-based visual storyteller working on long-form projects about memory, family, contemporary events, and history. His main medium is a hand-made limited edition photobook.

Yoshikatsu Fujii’s book “red string” based about the divorce of his parents. There is a japanese theory that when someone’s born, there is a red thread that is tied to them, an invisible red thread that connects two people that are destined to meet and be connected in their lives regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This red string may stretch or tangle, but never break however for Yoshikatsu Fujii’s parents they weren’t connected by red thread or it came undone.

red string interview with Yoshikatsu Fujii:

Wade Carroll

Based in Byron Bay and born in Sydney, Australia, Carroll is a surf photographer and filmmaker known for his work with world renowned surfers such as Mikey February and Mikey Wright, documenting the behind the scenes of the surf lifestyle.

Wade’s connection to surfing is definitely an important aspect of his photography. He has a deep love for the ocean and the surfing culture, which is beautifully reflected in his photographs. His photographs of surfers are not just about the sport itself, but also about capturing the essence of the surfing lifestyle. Wade’s photography goes beyond just capturing the physical act of surfing. His work also convey the emotions, togetherness, and the sense of being one with nature that surfers often experience.

Best known for her powerful portraits, Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. Cameron helped prove that portrait photography was indeed a veritable fine art medium in a context where photography was not yet widely accepted as such.

When Julia Margaret Cameron began taking pictures in the 1860s, photography was largely defined by formal commercial studio portraits, elaborate high art narratives, or clinical scientific or documentary renderings. Cameron, on the other hand, forged her own path as a thoughtful and experimental portrait artist who happened to use a camera instead of paint.

–Annie by Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron didn’t take her first photograph until age 48. The camera gave Cameron something to do as all her children were grown and her husband was often away on business. From that moment on, Cameron dedicated herself to mastering the difficult tasks of processing negatives and focusing on subjects in order to capture beauty.

Cameron considered her 1864 portrait of Annie Philpot to be her first successful work of art.

She wasted no time in marketing, exhibiting, and publishing her artistic photographs, and it wasn’t long before she was successfully exhibiting and selling prints of her photographs in London and abroad.

She proved that portrait photography was a true art form, she described her unique goal as an artist in her unfinished memoir.

I have chose to study Julia Margaret Cameron as her work has the same theme as mine. She has the theme of girlhood in her portraits, representing womanhood and motherhood.

Cameron presents Girlhood in a slightly different way to my work as her work doesn’t particularly portray the feeling of being free, but more representing the meaning of female figures in her time.

Justine Kurland is a contemporary American photographer. Best known for her large-scale C-prints of rural landscapes inhabited by nude women, Kurland’s surreal images evoke pagan utopias or post-apocalyptic or pre-industrial worlds.

Examples of her work:

Girl Pictures

One of Justine Kurland’s most successful projects, maybe even the most successful and well-known is Girl Pictures. Presented as a photobook, this is my biggest inspiration for my personal study project.

‘Every teenager is a teenager pretending to be a teenager.’

I was fascinated by this project of hers because she has a variety of different themed images. They all have the overall theme of like girls having freedom, doing what they want; however, she has created different photoshoots.

For example, these are some examples of images of Kurland’s that are more rural, featuring settings like the countryside, fields, streams, swamps, nature and day-time settings:

Whereas, on the other hand, there’s also images of hers that are based in more urban settings. They have the same theme and story to them but the environment is the city, residential areas and night-time settings:

The variety in her images depicts the story of runaway teenagers, and how they can find freedom in deserted countryside’s but also being almost lost in a big city.

I aim to create this kind of variety in my own work, with different planned and candid photoshoots.

“The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that wad much clear.”

Justine Kurland’s take on the classic American tale of the runaway takes us on a wild ride of freedom, memorializing the fleeting moments of adolescence and its fearless protagonists. The girls in their baggy jeans and bare feet. The girls in their leather boots and used sweaters. There’s something about them that feels like so many teenage girls and I want my photographs to mirror this feeling of empathy for my viewers.

The story behind ‘Girl pictures’

Justine Kurland created this book based on her own childhood experiences, her images almost foreshadow herself. She channelled angry energy of girl bands into her photographs of teenagers ( This vibe of photographs represents girlhood in a different way).

The first girl Kurland photographed was the daughter (age 15) of the guy she was dating at the time. She preferred her company to his. After he left for work in the mornings, they concieved a plan to shoot film stills starring the girl as a teenage runaway. The only surviving picture from the time shows her in a cherry tree by the westside highway:

She hovers pinkly between the river and the highway, two modes of travel that share a single vanishing point.

Kurland pursued this idea of teenage runaways and continued to develop her project using college freshman’s and teenagers from various high schools. she said ‘looking back, it seemed miraculous that so many of them were prepared to get into a strangers car and be driven off to an out of the way location. But then, being a teenage girl is nothing without the willingness and ability to posture as the teenage girl.’

I intend for my images to create this kind of aura.

Justine Kurland – ‘female utopia’

My main inspiration is from her book called ‘girl pictures’ its exactly what I wanted to base my photoshoot on and how id like to represent femininity. It shows girls coming together and the simplistic caring traits that are shown.

About Justine’s book/photography:

Kurland started this project in 1997 when she was a graduate student at Yale. In an essay at the back of the book, she crowns Alyssum as “the first girl” to be photographed. It started as a kind of make-believe. At fifteen Alyssum had been sent to live with her dad, whom Kurland was dating at the time. While he was at work, the two women bonded and began a collaboration, merging imaginations to plot out a narrative of a teenage runaway. Kurland went on to find more make-believe runaways, but one of the images from this time seems to hold a special importance; a portrait of Alyssum takes up a full spread towards the end of the book. Perched in a cherry tree between the Hudson river and a highway, Alyssum looks back over her shoulder. The river seems to flow away, while the headlights of cars on the road seem to be approaching. With her body in profile, Alyssum doesn’t seem to follow either direction.

Analysing some of Justine’s images:

Adventure stories were a source of inspiration for this project. The girls in Girl Pictures plagiarize these myths until they become their own, until the original myth is hardly relevant anymore. What’s left after all this repetition of runaway legends and costumes are the common themes: rebellion, self-sufficiency, confidence. A kind of inverse of the American Dream, but with the same carrot on a string: freedom. Perhaps this is why we love runaways so much.

We see worn out overalls holding onto a girl’s body by one strap. The girl at the centre of this image guides the others, looking past the camera as if it doesn’t even matter, as if the thing worth examining is actually behind us.

But of course with freedom comes the threat of danger. So many of the images in Girl Pictures were taken outside in locations that feel desolate or easy to overlook. They are often staged under bridges or beyond fences or on the sides of highways; places that feel synonymous with warnings.

The focal point of the image is the back of a young girl who is raising her shirt. Instead of her face, we see the eyes of all the girls surrounding her, watching the big reveal. There’s one boy in the group, but his eyes are covered. A girl has wrapped her arms around him from behind and places her fingers over each of his eyes. It’s funny to see such an obvious removal of the male gaze, especially as it’s still present – and yet the delicate hands of a teenage girl prove capable of obstructing it. As viewers we look from his covered eyes to her watchful ones.

Yet it feels beside the point to spend too much time considering a male perspective when looking at this project. The subjects move on, and do more interesting things. They collapse in the snow in ‘Snow Angels, 2000’, and roast marshmallows over a garbage fire in ‘Puppy Love, Fire, 1999’. It starts to feel as if they exist in their own reality, just removed enough. This is especially strong in the photographs that appear to capture two parallel worlds.

There are other things uniting all the girls in these photographs. The deeper you get into the book, the more difficult it becomes to see each girl as a distinct character. The camera stays just far enough away to keep the subjects slightly anonymous. Or perhaps it’s because they are mostly long haired, or wearing similar clothing, or belonging to that vague age range that captures adolescence. Whatever it is, they begin to blend together into one visually unified group of girls. 

Kurland’s focus is less on individual girls, and more on what happens when they band together.

I found this text on a website and i agree with how i perceive the book and the idea of how girls specifically teenage girls are represented:

‘I don’t know any of the girls in Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, but it really feels like I do. Or at least, I must have seen them. Maybe they were there on the side of the highway, or in some public restroom, or just standing on a sidewalk as I passed by. The girls in their baggy jeans and bare feet. The girls in their leather boots and used sweaters. There’s something about them that feels like so many teenage girls. The images in this book weigh me down with a sense of nostalgia, and it’s not just the late nineties fashion. It’s the fact that the girls seem to be disappearing. Like catching a wild animal in a trap, it feels like by the time you look at each image of these girls you’ve already missed them. They’ve run off to someplace better or just some place that isn’t here.’

Using this book as a reference I’ve found that it creates an emotional connection and deeper meaning.

About Carolle Bénitah

She was born in 1965 and is aged 58 years old. Bénitah lives in Marseille, France. She is a French Moroccan photographer, who worked for ten years as a fashion designer before turning to photography in 2001, and now explores memory, family and the passage of time.  Often pairing old family snapshots with handmade accents, such as embroidery, beading and ink drawings, Bénitah seeks to reinterpret her own history as daughter, wife, and mother.

She began to become interested in her family photographs when flipping through an album of her childhood. She felt overwhelmed by an emotion that she did not understand. The photographs taken 40 years ago awakened a fear of something that was familiar yet also so unknown, causing her to feeling the need to add meaning to the photos. She wanted to explore her identity in this way, to help her define and understand herself more.

Her Work

She uses achieve photographs that she reprints and manipulates them using embroidery and sometimes even cut outs bits of the photo. The pictures are simple snapshots, purely taken for memories, memories which clearly mean a lot to Bénitah, in both a negative and positive way. In my project, I want to embroider on both new and old photos, using the thread as a representation of my grandmother.

Carolle Bénitah: Photos Souvenirs

“To embroider my photograph, I make holes in the paper. With each stitch, I stick the needle through the paper. Each hole is a putting to death of my demons. It is like an exorcism. I stab the paper until I don’t hurt anymore”

-Carolle Bénitah

Her most popular series, Photos Souvenirs, is an exploration of her memories from her childhood in Morocco and was worked on between 2009 and 2014. This series is made up of old family achieves, which she manipulates by threading beads and embroidering designs relating to her feelings towards each photographic memories. She calls the photos she finds “excavations”, and she starts by transposing them onto new paper. She mostly uses red thread and beads, but some of her pieces also include gold and black coloured material. They add a shine to her photos, and each design holds significance. She sometimes even manipulates the photos in a more destructive way, cutting out individuals and placing them elsewhere. Photos Souvenirs was exhibited at Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, in 2015.

Growing up in a traditional Moroccan household, Bénitah was expected to do many typically- feminine tasks. The embroidery she adds to the achieves hold a lot of significance, portraying how she was taught to sew as a girl, and was expected to continue the activity for her entire life. She uses this to portray her distaste of being a good girl, a good wife and a loving mother. Embroidery in itself is a calm activity, however, Bénitah uses it to show her anger and other strong emotions.

Image Analysis

In this photograph, Bénitah is about six years old and holding hands with her smiling brother, but an army of cockroaches surrounds the children, and their hands are bound together in a ball of red wool. Bénitah used a red wool to create the wool and black, for the surrounding cockroaches.

The photo itself is a simple, staged photograph, with natural lighting illuminating the young children’s faces. It is taken from an eye level view, however slightly above the children, indicating an adult took the photo. The area of focus is the bright red wool and it leads the viewers attention to the centre of the piece. The bright white outfits further bring the audience’s attention to the centre, as the white contrasts against the dull grey background. The photo has a shallow depth of field, further promoting the idea that it is an amateur photo, a family snapshot. Furthermore, the photo has a simple composition, the children simply being in the centre of the photo, the subject of the image. The cockroaches add a repetitive look to the photo, creating a representation of Bénitah’s feelings towards that moment. The bugs could be a portrayal of a threat, the wool signifying that her and her brother helped each other through everything. The innocent look on the children’s faces contrasts with the bold colours and shapes of the embroidery. The red wool could be a representation of love, the love she had for her brother which is what made them so close. Or it could be a portrayal of violence or even blood, perhaps suggesting that they were simply close due to a problem in the world or because they are family (the idea of being connected by blood). It’s interesting how Bénitah in cooperates such strong emotions into simple photographs, softening these harsh emotions by creating beautiful embroidery with her needle. At the time, (mid-1900s) society was based on very traditional values. Growing up in a traditional, catholic, Moroccan household clearly positioned Bénitah to grow up and become your typical women. Her pieces are a representation of how she disagreed with this concept, and shows her anger through the manipulation of photos from her childhood.

“It’s like an exorcism. I pierce the paper until I have no more evil”

-Carolle Bénitah

This is one of Carolle Bénitah’s most significant quotes, since it portrays the thought that goes into her work. She uses the needle to embroider her anger into the work, instead of keeping it bottled up inside. This is very inspiring, and I like the idea of conveying emotions through embroidery, both on new and old photos.

Carolle Bénitah’s link to Nostalgia

“I selected snapshots because they are linked to memory and loss”

-Carolle Bénitah

I think Carolle Bénitah’s work has a big link to nostalgia, however she shows both the negative and positive aspects of it through her art. She uses the embroidery as a healing ritual and calm her inner child. She also feels a mix of emotions when looking at the photos, which I think represents nostalgia perfectly, as I don’t think nostalgic feelings have to be completely positive.

Out of everything I have studied and responded to throughout this photography course femininity is the one I’m very passionate about and will continue to develop/expand my knowledge around this theme which will then allow me to interpret it in a creative way which I can then reflect that creativity into a photobook which ill design as my final project. When studying this theme in year 12 the aim was to find an artist that presented femininity as ‘innocent, young, caring, healthy’, Justine Kurland had produced some really good images which demonstrated those ideologies. However, to now develop this I will be producing images which will portray the opposite of those stereotypes, it will show how as girls specifically change (being older, meeting new people, understanding themselves, temporary happiness over long term happiness) focusing on all the problems/phases most teenage girls face. My photobook will have a nostalgic yet deep emotional feeling to it as it will show femininity in the past and what girls used to do when they were younger (nostalgic) and then compare that to how lifestyles change and how femininity is now interpreted, for me personally, and how things have changed (good and bad). I have already began forming a collection of pictures which ill use, mainly trying to get candid, random, raw images whenever I get a chance. I haven’t got a strict plan for where I will take my pictures, however, I know it will include a mix of candid and staged images… specifically documenting my friendship group and juxtaposing ‘girl pictures’ by Justine Kurland as her pictures had very bright colourful tones and majority of them where taken outside on fields, by lakes. Whereas my images will have more dark tones to create emotion and that sense of nostalgia from the past, its meant to demonstrate how girls change from what they used to do for fun in the past to what they now do for fun the difference is, is that the activities for young people to do in jersey are extremely limited now. My photobook will show what my friends and I do in our spare time and what its like to be a 17/18 year old girl in Jersey, juxtaposing with Justine Kurland’s images and story. Julia Margaret Cameron along side Justine Kurland is an artist I will also be including in my essay, Julia was the first photographer to capture femininity in 1868, this links to pictorialism.

Jim Goldberg is an American photographer who likes to focus a lot of his work on the neglected and ignored populations he takes time on these projects collecting thousands of photographs to make sure that the photos he choses represents his thoughts and views on the subject/ mater he is trying to get across, Goldberg uses film and digital cameras to create his book Raised By Wolves which shows a neglected and hurt population, his work is moving to his audiences as his work has been personalised by the people who he has included in it from people writing notes, drawings and dialog, this shows he is a photographer who wants to make an impact on people and wants to get people to speak up about where and who they come from.

Jim Shows his photos in many ways from scanning film and including the film negatives, peculiar layouts to full bleeds he includes multiple ways to show a story behind his work. Raised By Wolves is classed by some people as a novel with pictures whilst others see it as photographs which tell a story accompanied by text. For me personally I see it as both what you see tells you a story which you interpret and the righting tells you another story.

Jim Goldberg has inspired me in they way he layouts his images and presents them, they way he does it has meaning behind they stories they tell they are eye-catching and appealing o the audience, i also love the way Goldberg includes hand writing from the people he photographs i see it as a really good way to personalise work and create a mood around the work.

Meaning behind his work

Raised By Wolves is about probes the gap between dreams and reality in the lives of teenage runaways living on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and bout a neglected community which people don’t think about, and the youth which are getting lost in addiction and substance abuse, this project let the people be heard and seen when they hadn’t been before. Jim Goldbergs work always shows a divide in society predominantly focusing on the side which most people don’t see and making people see it this aspect of his work is truly moving n the sense he gives people voices and allows them to tell their story’s when no one else would listen.