Sam Stephenson > Quotes

“I was once present at a lecture that Eugene Smith gave to some students at a school of photography. At the end, they protested because he had made no mention of photography, but had spoken the whole time about music. He calmed them by saying that what was valid for one was valid for another. —Henri Cartier-Bresson”
― Sam Stephenson, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

“these entries we can see Smith focusing on the human landscape and the tension he felt between isolation and the teeming churn of collectives, a tension he never reconciled, and many themes of home—creating or finding a home, leaving and returning home.”
― Sam Stephenson, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

“For the next seven decades the story of Smith attending these sixty-three consecutive shows has been repeated often, including by me. The trouble is, Mexicana was performed only thirty-five times.”
― Sam Stephenson, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

“In a depressed era when most young adults grasped for any foothold they could find, the nineteen-year-old Smith had already given up a major university scholarship and challenged a prominent magazine’s editorial boundaries until he was fired. He wouldn’t follow his father’s burdened, suit-and-tie path to an early death; he might kill himself, but in a different way.”
― Sam Stephenson, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

“could be an antidote to clinical depression. Smith fed off risk and nerves for the rest of his life, noticeable early with his cavalier photo work in combat zones in the Pacific theater of World War II, and he fell into deep depressions when the urgency wasn’t there.”
― Sam Stephenson, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View