Damning War from Within: Eugene Smith at the ICP

It’s easy to be shocked by war photography, that volatile synergy of subject and medium which inevitably reveals humanity in its ugliest state. The best war photography, however, captures something beyond the horror of violence. W. Eugene Smith photographed many different subjects throughout his long and prolific career, but his unflinching images from World War II’s Pacific theatre remain his best-known work, perhaps because they discover such power and nuance in the conflicting emotions that pervade war.A new exhibition at the International Center for Photography, “Living with the Dead: W. Eugene Smith and World War II,” showcases eleven of Smith’s photographs from a 1943-1945 Pacific tour of duty, during which he was embedded on assignment from Ziff-Davis and Life with U.S. Marine combat units island hopping toward Japan. Minimal to an extreme, this densely compelling exhibition is housed in a tiny mausoleum-like cube, dressed with teal walls and dark grey carpet. Nothing distracts viewers from the eleven pieces, prints by Smith himself, which seem to glow as if backlit by the light of a dozen precisely-aimed spotlights. According to the sole commentary text in the exhibition, the title comes from a book of war photos that Smith abandoned after he was severely wounded in the line of duty, and refers to the soldiers in his photographs – most of whom were dead by the time Smith began compiling his work.

Smith, a 25 year-old photojournalist when he began following the Marines across the Pacific, is revered as a master of the modern photo essay. Although his World War II works precede his seminal photo essays for Life, they nonetheless treat multifaceted themes with the same consistency, nuance and development that he would later harness for his essays. His rapport with the military subjects he lived with and followed into battle lends his work an intimacy that threads throughout his photos, which portray the perspective of a participant, not an observer. One has the distinct feeling that Smith shared the emotions of the subjects he shot. These works immortalize their subjects in life and death; they speak like eulogies.

The dead hold dominion in Smith’s work. Bodies of soldiers both living and deceased play equal roles in his scenes, and the knowledge that even the live actors in these works would soon be dead lends his work a melancholy poignancy. The living and dead become one and the same; they are both victims of war, equalized by the onslaught of destructive forces Smith was so skilled at capturing on film. Smith’s photographs of subjects both living and dead carry an intense feeling of occurrence, catching motion-blurred movements or fleeting facial expressions and freezing these passing moments into infinity.

Two works from the U.S.S. Bunker Hill, the aircraft carrier on which Smith lived with his military comrades, convey this feeling of occurrence with nearly opposite effects. One shows blasts from explosions during a Japanese attack, white flashes of water bursting out from blooming black clouds of smoke, thrillingly transporting you to this terrifying moment. The other, the famous “Burial at Sea from U.S.S. Bunker Hill,” depicts a naval funeral from above. A falling, coffined body blurs downward to the sea, in stark contrast to the static figures of his living comrades standing above him on the deck of the ship. There is a sad sense of role reversal here – of the dead in active motion while the survivors stand inert.

At its best, Smith’s work imparts on viewers not just a feeling of “being there,” but of understanding what it means to be there. Exciting victory characterizes “Marine Demolition Team Blasting Out a Cave on Hill 382, Iwo Jima” (1945), which shows a massive explosion as Marines blast a cave from behind cover of the jagged, rocky wasteland of Iwo Jima. “In Their Church Which Has Become a Hospital, Barefoot Filipino Women Worship, Only a Few Feet from the Expressionless Mask of a Burned American Officer” (1944) points to the pathetic absurdity of setting up a makeshift hospital in a church, and somehow captures an overwhelming sadness in the officer’s blank face, which is completely covered by white bandages. Two other photos are twin memorials to the wounded and dying victims of battle, consistent in their titles, subject matter and melancholy feeling. There is no glory in dying painfully on a battlefield.

The lack of context in the exhibition sometimes bewilders. Two photos, both titled “Civilians Driven from Natural Caves in the Saipan Mountains by U.S. Smoke Grenades” (1944), contain palpable terror from their fleeing civilian figures, but there is also the sense of a story left untold. These people are also victims of war, yet Smith does not share with them the same sense of empathy he displays for the soldiers on either side. Inevitably, the emotional incompleteness of these pieces invites those perennial questions of medium: are these photos self-contained works of art? What do we gain by viewing them alone and out of context? Has Smith failed to capture something universal in these two photos because we want to know what’s happening in them? The answers to these questions will be intensely personal and divisive, but they are a large part of the exhibition because of the uncompromising lack of background information offered. One starts to wonder whether the impact of these works would be transformed if given historical context.

Yet Smith’s work is powerful precisely because so many of his pieces speak for themselves. “Japanese Defenders of Tarawa” (1943) contains no hidden meanings in its twisted mass of corpses piled amidst the stagnant puddles of a mass grave. The terrible revelation is that these are people, but people rendered literally faceless – bloated and rotting and stripped of individual meaning by war’s carnage. “Wounded, Dying Infant Found by American Soldier in Saipan Mountains” (1944) is perhaps most shocking because of its vivid contrasts: a soldier gingerly clutching the tiny, bloodied body of a baby, another soldier smoking in the blurry background and looking on as if to say “pity, but that’s the way it is.” The foreground soldier’s face is turned away from the lens and half hidden in shadows, but one sees in it the sorrowful disgust of a man who understands the meaning of war to the most innocent of victims.

These images need no context. The stories are contained within them, told with self-evident clarity through complex emotions. Smith may have had a message to tell with his war photography – he was a vocal critic of violence who hoped his photography would be remembered as an indictment of war – but the best of his photos convey messages of their own that turn out both deeply personal and universal. The first impression one takes away from the exhibition is that it’s disappointingly small and lacking in historical context, but the work as shown ultimately has an impact like one of Smith’s captured explosions, and curators at the ICP were right not to dilute it with repetition or historical minutiae.