Before he was a well-known photojournalist, W. Eugene Smith made a name for himself as a photo correspondent in the Pacific theater in WWII for Ziff-Davis and LIFE magazine. He captured perilous scenes on the frontlines and the heart-wrenching conditions of the war from 1943 to 1945 and is shown here during that period. His empathetic lens recreated the war for readers-at-home with unimaginable proximity. Smith was present for the major landings including Guam, Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Okinawa. It was in the Battle of Okinawa where Smith both captured some of the greatest war-time photographs in action and faced a near-fatal injury that took him out of commision for a year.

William Eugene Smith was born on December 30, 1918 in Wichita, Kansas. Smith first began taking photographs due to his interest in aviation. By the time he was in high school, his photography prowess had expanded and his images were published in a local paper as well as The New York Times. He briefly studied at the University of Notre Dame before moving to New York City to work for Newsweek, and later Life Magazine. He is most known for the photo essays he created for Life in the late 1940s and early 50s. Smith traveled across the world to various sites, from remote villages to big cities, he shot arresting photo stories of themes such as rural poverty in Colorado; as well as extraordinary people such as Amude E. Callen, a black midwife in South Carolina; or Albert Schwitzer, a genius polymath from Alsace-Lorraine. These essays were lauded for their ‘humanistic’ approach to image-making and praised by colleagues like Ansel Adams. In 1955, Smith left Life to join Magnum Photos. One of Smith’s final photographic projects was his coverage of the Minamata disease in the eponymous town in Japan in which he published Minamata in 1975. Smith moved to Arizona in 1977 and died the next year on October 15.

W. Eugene Smith is regarded as one of the most significant photojournalists for his impact on visual storytelling. His precise and near-obsessive photographic practices and penchant for 35 mm have influenced many after him. He was posthumously inducted to the International Photography Hall of Fame in 1984 and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was created in 1980 to support humanitarian photographers.