Estimate: € 5.000–6.000

Vintage silver print

15 x 24,5 cm

Photographer's distribution stamp and address stamp on the reverse

LITERATURE W. Eugene Smith, Minamata, London 1975, p. 138-139.

It was a dramatic photographic essay by W. Eugene Smith in Life magazine that brought world attention to the Minamata disease. Caused by methyl mercury in industrial wastewater from a chemical factory from 1932 to 1968, the disease surreptitiously claimed thousands of lives while the government and the company did little to prevent the pollution. Smith and his later wife, a Japanese American student named Aileen Mioko Sprague, decided to document the scandal. Initially they planned to stay in Minamata for three weeks but ended up staying for three years. The most striking and iconic photograph of the essay shows Ryoko Uemura, holding her severely deformed daughter, Tomoko, in a Japanese bath chamber. The image was first published in June 2, 1972, in Life magazine as the centrepiece of the essay and critics still call it »the pieta of our industrial age«.

Start price: €3.000