Minamata (1971-75), made by W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith in Minamata, Japan, examines methyl-mercury poisoning caused by Chisso Corporation and its effects on residents, families, labor, and civic life. During more than three years of residence beside the Shiranui Sea, the collaborators combined photography with Aileen's interpretation, notes, and knowledge of Japan.
Chisso had discharged mercury-bearing waste from acetaldehyde production into Minamata Bay, contaminating fish and shellfish and causing severe neurological disease. The Smiths arrived during renewed victim activism, after families had sued Chisso and others pursued direct negotiations. Their essay examines corporate responsibility, government mediation, compensation, stigma, and a town's dependence on its dominant employer. It also centers care, survival, and resistance. Rejecting conventional journalistic neutrality, Smith described responsibility to subjects and readers as the basis for an openly advocacy-oriented warning about industrial pollution.
The 1975 book brings together 151 black-and-white photographs of the bay, drainage pipes, fishing, domestic interiors, hospitals, classrooms, demonstrations, negotiations, and courtrooms. Strong tonal contrasts and close framing move between damaged landscapes, the physical effects of illness, public confrontation, and family care. Named subjects and accompanying testimony resist the anonymity of clinical illustration. Rather than following strict chronology, the sequence shifts among setting, personal histories, and political events.
The photographers often worked simultaneously, developing and reviewing their film at night. Contact sheets and successive exposures helped them refine the visual approach. Smith sometimes supplemented available light when needed, as in Tomoko and Mother in the Bath, where he combined light from a high window with two bounced strobes. Showing Ryoko Uemura caring for her daughter, the photograph became a focal point of the project's reception.
Minamata circulated before completion through Life in 1972, a 1973 Tokyo exhibition, and Camera 35 in 1974. Holt, Rinehart and Winston published the jointly credited book in 1975, when ICP also presented Minamata: Life Sacred and Profane in New York. Later exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the Center for Creative Photography, and Tsunagi Art Museum sustained its institutional presence.
