44,000 pounds of things

 

General Photography

“Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his [W. Eugene Smith] things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of ‘everything’ (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft” - excerpt from Gene Smith’s Sink