'The Walk to Paradise Garden' by W. Eugene Smith

<p>Then you can add social context as a factor in how this image has been received in the public, David.</p>

<p>Pretty much similar to my being downright turned off and frightened by Led Zeppelin's music when I heard it in the early '70's from it being first introduced to me by the pot smoking, tattooed, hell raising crowd and now I can listen and appreciate with a more open mind far removed from what the cool kids think.</p>

<p><em>Then you can add social context as a factor in how this image has been received in the public, David.</em><br>

You bet! I can't ever imagine social context NOT being a factor.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I can't ever imagine social context NOT being a factor.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Except if the body of a photographer's work is only shared and appraised within the vacuum of a group of like (high?) minded appreciators such as curators and private collectors who rarely show and treat the work as pop art for mass consumption. I was really referring to social context in how that image has been defined by pop culture.</p>

<p>How would you think the "The Walk to Paradise Garden" be appreciated today if it had been kept from public view as part of a private collection instead of its "iconic" status as defined by a mass audience to the point it's now treated and seen as "clip art"?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>To me the attraction of the picture is that the children <em>are</em> turned away from the camera. They could be anyone's children. The children are walking out of the picture, as children walk out of their parents' lives at some stage. We cannot see what they are walking towards, but then none of us knows what the future holds for our children. This picture also speaks to me of the other-worldliness of a child's life at that age, when what is mundane to the adult can have an almost magical significance to the child.</p>

The photo is popular because it has emotional resonance with anyone - which means eventually practically everyone of

adult age- who has gone through a severely traumatic event and is seeking a way back to who they were and how the

world seemed before it all seemed to go horribly wrong.

 

I'm not big on spilling my guts in a public forum, but for me that event was my grandfather's very brutal murder (torture

was involved) during a failed burglary, when I was eleven. It has taken me 46 years to figure out how to start letting that

wound go, to say in my own head, to my memory of what happened, "Goodbye Grandpa, rest now." . That has only

happened this week.

 

I'm ready to consider walking on to a new garden, a new part of my life.

 

So for me, the power of "TheWalk to Paradise Garden" is that it archives something Alfred Stieglitz tried and failed with in his

series of photos of the sky, which he called "Equivalents". Smith made a modern metaphor which does not need decoding

and deciphering. You see it and you get it.

<p>Catharsis.</p>

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Gene identifies with the horizontal figure. This is not to say that he takes himself to be Christ but he identifies with the victim who has suffered unjust punishment. ... He believed profoundly in the Fall of Man. His life's duty was to stalk this world and to lie in wait for its rare moments of nobility, its redemption from the Fall. These were the moments he wished to record. ... Such moments he then offered back to the world as a form of catharsis.<br>

— <em>John Berger</em>, 'Pieta: W. Eugene Smith'</p>

</blockquote>

<p>.</p>

 

<p>W. Eugene Smith's photograph has been used in various ways over the years. A photo teacher told me<br>

he bought an LP once - not because of the music, but it had Smith`s 'The Walk to Paradise Garden` as cover photo.</p>