In 1959, W. Eugene Smith began assembling an extended retrospective that would carry his photography beyond the conventions of the magazine photo-essay. He worked on The Big Book for three years, producing two handmade, folio-sized maquettes comprising roughly 380 pages and 450 images. The project was not published at the time. This 2013 University of Texas Press edition presents Smith’s ambitious construction in facsimile, more than five decades after he conceived it.
Smith drew from subjects that had defined his work: combat during the Second World War, a country doctor and nurse-midwife, Pittsburgh, Albert Schweitzer in Africa, village life in rural Spain, and psychiatric care in Haiti. Yet The Big Book is not organized as a conventional career survey. Photographs are removed from their original assignments and chronology, then regrouped into connected chapters and subchapters. Documentary situations answer one another across place and time, turning retrospective selection into an argument about suffering, labor, responsibility, and the photographer’s relation to the world.
The significance of the book lies equally in this sequencing. Smith sought a literary structure associated with the layered, associative writing of James Joyce and William Faulkner. Meaning accumulates through recurrence, contrast, and interruption rather than through a stable timeline. The result reveals not only the range of his humanistic photography but also the intensity with which he treated editing and layout as expressive forms in their own right.
Issued as a three-volume hardcover set in a slipcase, the facsimile is accompanied by contextual material from the Center for Creative Photography, where Smith’s archive is held. Contributions include texts by Katherine Martinez, William S. Johnson, John Berger, Leslie Squyres, and Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, as well as Smith’s “The Walk to Paradise Garden.” An appendix maps the complete layout with image titles, dates, and reproductions from original prints. For a serious collection, The Big Book deserves attention as both a concentrated encounter with Smith’s photographic thought and a primary document of how a major twentieth-century photographer imagined the photobook as an autonomous work.
