The Walk to Paradise Garden

From An Aperture Monograph by W. Eugene Smith.

Circa 1973-75 I took a picture.  It was long before I became familiar with Smith's work.  I was in Sweden and the setting was a dark forest path looking out onto a summer-sun filled glade, at the far end of which was a small bridge over a brook leading the path onwards, elsewhere.  

I was pleased with it.  It spoke of a hopeful future, an ambition to discover.  I printed it, mounted it, I think I even won a high school photography prize for it.  I am sure I still have it somewhere among boxes that were packed for moves and then never unpacked.  I look forward to finding it again at some point.  

Some years later, I became aware of Smith's work and eventually came across this photograph, The Walk to Paradise Garden,  not dissimilar to mine.  His was obviously taken much earlier than mine and included the two children which added an immense richness and promise to it.  

Click to enlarge.  

Smith was a photographer for LIFE magazine and stationed in the Pacific covering World War II there.  In 1945 he was severely wounded from a mortar round on Okinawa.  He returned home to New York state for surgeries and recuperation.  For a full year he was unable to hold a camera at all.  This picture was his first photo after his injury and recuperation.  The subjects were his two children, Patrick and Juanita, walking the wooded paths behind his home.  It became his most popular photo and Edward Steichen included it as the final photo in The Family of Man exhibition in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.    

From the book.

1946

The Walk to Paradise Garden . . . the children in the photograph are my children, and on the day I made this photographic effort, I was not sure I would be capable of ever photographing again.

There had been the war – now it seems like a long time ago, that war called World, volume II – and during my 13th Pacific invasion shell fragments ended my photographic coverage of it. Too painful, helpless years followed my multiple wounding, during which time I had to stifle my restless spirit into a state of impassive, non-creative suspension, while the doctors by their many operations slowly tried to repair me. . . .  But now, this day, I would endeavor to refute two years of negation. On this day, for the first time since my injuries, I would try again to make the camera work for me, would try to force my body to control the mechanics of the camera; and, as well, I would try to command my creative spirit out of its exile.

Urgently, something compelled that this photograph must not be a failure – pray God that I could do so much as physically force a roll of film into the camera! I was determined that this first photograph must sing of more than being a technical accomplishment. Determined that it would speak of a gentle moment of a spirited purity in contrast to the deprave savagery I had raged against with my war photographs – my last photographs. I was almost desperate in this determination, in my insistence that for some reason his first exposure must have a special quality. I've never quite understood why it had to be thus, why it had to be the first and not the second; why, if not accomplish today, it could not be accomplished next week; yet that day I challenged myself to do it, against my nerves, against my reason. . . .

Whatever the reason – probably more complex than one – I felt, without labeling it as such, that it was to be a day of spiritual decision. . . .

Still, and regardless of the conflict that raged within me, there was no change in my determination, and of my intentions for that first photograph. These woods with these children prancing through them in happiness . . .

. . . as against war photographs I had made of a terrified mother and her child wheeling in bewilderment behind a shell-broken tree . . .