W. Eugene Smith

"In 1955, having just ended his high-profile but stormy career with Life magazine by resigning, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant's book commemorating the city's bicentennial. Smith stayed a year, compiling nearly seventeen thousand photographs for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of the work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest set of photographs. Now, in an astonishing, first-time assemblage of the core images Smith asserted were the "synthesis of the whole," we see not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of mid-century, postwar America."--BOOK JACKET.

"W. Eugene Smith is the master of the photographic essay; he created essays which include some of the most dramatic and affecting single images of the twentieth century. Fiercely energetic, he made countless photographs memorable for their formal brilliance and for their compassion. This volume of Aperture's Masters of Photography series presents more than seventy of Smith's greatest photographs, selected from work created over the course of forty-five years.". "In his introductory essay, Jim Hughes, Smith's biographer, provides an overview of Smith's life and insight into his work."--BOOK JACKET.

Minamata is a city in southern Japan severely affected by mercury poisoning from industrial pollution.