Gene had a reputation for being difficult to work with, with uncompromising professional and ethical standards. A vision of his work that he himself wanted total control over in print. Not print, but magazine layout print. He was beaten badly by employees of Chisso during his photographing of Minamata. Smith claimed that his vocation was "..to do nothing less than record, by word and photograph, the human condition." An enormous undertaking by any standard.
I saw Smith a couple of years before his first stroke. He was still with Aileen then. Quite a moving lecture and presentation.
Keith,
Luis mentions that beating he took, but my research suggests that it was his work involving Pittsburg and the level of control you mentioned as far as the editing and editorial contol that threw Gene over the edge.
Way back in the eighties when I was a painter, an art dealer named Ivan Karp on West Broadway was interested in my work. Ivan Karp had worked for Leo Castelli and broke off on his own to open his own gallery called O.K. Harris.
Ivan Karp said come back when you have more when I showed him some slides of my paintings. At that time I was use to rejection, and I already knew the art world was a closed society that didn't really include me. I took Mr. Karp's response as being a polite rejection, but he must of known that I did not take his comment to show him more work seriously.
"When I said I like your work I meant it, he said. "Please come back when you have more," Mr Karp said.
When I went back I got further afirmation that my work was good, but Mr Karp suggested that I had too many ideas, and if I wanted to be commercially sucsessful that I would have to comodify my work and limit the exicution of my ideas.
I kinda quit making art for others after that to avoid the artistic despair, yet I kept pounding away in the arts. I've performed off-off Broadway and at the Joseph Papp Public Theater; I got a MFA in creative writing and got on a shortlist to attend Breadloaf Writers' conference if someone cancelled; the Editor of the Hudson Review liked one of my stories and wanted to publish it, but it got shelved by a Review Board. Anyways if I would have gotten to attend Breadloaf or if I would have gotten published in the Hudson Review I'm pretty sure today my life would be different because closed doors would have beened opened. Funny thing is when I gave up on painting galleries started calling me because of old slides left at "Artist's Space."
I kinda know why many of my creative friends sooner or later destroyed themselves. They lived their lives the only way they could: passionately. At this point, artistically, the only person I need to impress is myself. FTW.
Cal
POSTSCRIPT: I forgot that I was also a semifinalist in an "America's Best Screenwriting Competition." This was about a decade before I got my MFA in creative writing. Anyways the string second place/runner up finishes in the visual arts, performing arts, and the literary arts is like year after year getting nominated for a grand prize but never winning the Emmy, Tony, Golden Globe, Pulitzer...
