W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]

 Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors. 
 I was after a set of pictures, so that when people looked at them they would say, “This is war”—that the people who were in the war would believe that I had truthfully captured what they had gone through... I worked in the framework that war is horrible. I want to carry on what I have tried to do in these pictures. War is a concentrated unit in the world and these things are clearly and cleanly seen. Things like race prejudice, poverty, hatred and bigotry are sprawling things in civilian life, and not so easy to define as war. 
 ... my pictures are complex and so am I. When I am almost symbolistic in writing, there is a more limiting differences of accepting, while I can be even more complex in the photographs and people can usually accept them within the framework of their own limitations or lack of limitations—there is no dictionary meaning... they can look up for the photographic image and allow it to confuse them... 
 In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way that I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better that way in print, too. 
 Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter... and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole. 
 Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work... The completed version a print should be sufficient and fair return for a magazine’s investment, for it is the means of fulfilling the magazine’s purpose... The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall. Negatives are private, as is my bedroom. (Letter to LIFE Magazine, refusing to allow the magazine to have possession of his negatives.) 
 I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war—the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again. 
 Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative. 
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