MINAMATA: A Warning to the World (First UK Edition)

SMITH, W. Eugene & Aileen M. Minamata: A Warning to the World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1975.

4to (30 x 25 cm). Original publisher's embossed burgundy leatherette. Illustrated dust jacket. 192 pp., illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs, with map, chronology, and medical report. First British edition.

Minamata is a fishing and farming town on the Japanese island of Kyushu. Beginning in the 1950s its people began to suffer a mysterious affliction: convulsions, loss of motor control, numbness, blindness, and death. This would eventually be identified as the direct consequence of methyl mercury dumped into Minamata Bay by the Chisso Chemical Corporation.

The company had known for years. The victims, many of them too poor and too isolated to mount any effective protest, were left to struggle largely alone against one of the most powerful industrial interests in Japan. W. Eugene Smith, already one of the most celebrated photojournalists of the twentieth century, arrived in Minamata in 1971 with his wife and co-author Aileen, and spent nearly three years documenting what he found.

The work constitutes his last major photographic essay and, by wide consensus, is among the most morally urgent photographic works ever made. The image of sixteen-year-old Tomoko Uemura being bathed by her mother, her body twisted beyond recognition by mercury poisoning, has become one of the defining photographs of the century: an image that forces upon its viewer an absolute confrontation with the human cost of industrial indifference. 

Very good in a very good unclipped dust jacket. Jacket shows some very minor rubbing along edges and foxing to inner faces. Volume shows some rubbing along edges with wear along the lower edge of covers. Contents near fine with some very mild toning at edges; otherwise clear, bright, and well preserved.

Catalogue Number: HH000231