postcards from new york

By editrrix

viewpoints

Too much rain and a bad mood kept me peering outside my window instead of heading out. There is a story in the book I'm reading about the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who, after getting sacked from LIFE Magazine in 1955 had accepted a small commission to photograph the city of Pittsburg over the course of three weeks. After relentlessly complaining that he could not meet the deadline (he spent more than a year in the area taking more than 10,000 images) he went slightly mad because he could not edit his photos in any way that made sense to him. "Wired out on amphetamines, banging out letters full of delirious, teeth-grinding declarations of intent, Smith would work for three or four days straight and then collapse. Free at last to to realize his ambitions of total artistic control, he began to suffer a kind of dementia of seeing."* Smith finally separated from his family and moved into a loft on Sixth Avenue (at 28th Street). From that loft he recoiled from life in New York and only took images from the limited vantage point of his window. Soon he had six cameras pointed out to the street.

* The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer , Pantheon, 2005.

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