Gene Smiths Sink, Sam Stephenson
Gene Smiths Sink, Sam Stephenson
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Gene Smith's Sink
A Wide-Angle View

Author: Sam Stephenson

Narrator: Coleen Marlo

Unabridged: 5 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/22/2017


Synopsis

Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith is photography's most celebrated humanist. During his reign as a photo-essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of jazz musicians, disasters, doctors, and midwives revolutionized the role that image-making played in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.

In 1997, lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith's stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson set out to research those who knew him from various angles. In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson revives Smith's life and legacy, merging traditional biography with highly untraditional digressions. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; and Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whom Smith recorded on surreptitious tapes.

About Sam Stephenson

Sam Stephenson is a writer and documentarian born in Washington, North Carolina. He is the author of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, as well as many pieces for publications such as the New York Times, the Paris Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American. He is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a two-time Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award winner, and the 2012-2013 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, where in 2013 he founded Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature & Materials.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Phil

I can't say enough about this book. Aside from exploring the enigma of Gene Smith--Stephenson's work of the last two-plus decades--it sent me off in multiple listening and reading directions, taught me much about photography and obsession, and kept me locked in to what is essentially a detective sto......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

Anyone (and I mean anyone) who enjoys history is bound to prefer certain periods to others. While I'm a big fan of Middle Eastern and Turkish history around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman rebirth as the Republic of Turkey, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View touched me in way th......more

Goodreads review by Jared

Read because it was mentioned in a recent Ross Gay essay. Didn’t disappoint!......more

Goodreads review by Jay

I took a flyer on this book, based on its curious title. I had never heard of Gene Smith, but found that Smith was a prolific photographer and artist. He lived the stereotypical life of an artist, focused on the creation of art, at times oblivious of all else. The author approaches Smith like a priv......more

Goodreads review by Terry

The archive of a writer or an artist can be an incredibly rich, deep well of inspiration, especially when a truly open and inquisitive researcher digs in. Sam Stephenson is just such a person. He probably knows the enormous archive of photographer W. Eugene Smith (held at the Center for Creative Pho......more