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In September 1948, an American physician working in Kremmling, a remote rural community in Colorado, briefly became a national celebrity, appearing on television and radio to talk about the demanding nature of his work. The reason for his fame was a striking photo essay by the pioneering American photographer W Eugene Smith, which appeared in the 20 September issue of Life magazine.
Entitled Country Doctor, the series opened with a brooding portrait of the subject, medical bag in hand, striding purposefully across a field beneath glowering storm clouds. In another more intimate image, fraught parents hug each other as they watch an emergency procedure being carried out on their injured infant.
The accompanying text told an equally dramatic story: how the selfless 32-year-old physician single-handedly tended to the wellbeing of a rural population of about 2,000 people, many of whom were scattered across 400 square miles of inhospitable terrain in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
“These 2,000 people are constantly falling ill, recovering or dying, having children, being kicked by horses and cutting themselves on broken bottles,” Life informed its readership. “A single country doctor, known in the profession as a ‘GP’, or general practitioner, takes care of them all. His name is Ernest Guy Ceriani.”
Back then, Life magazine had a readership of 20 million. “Around 30% of the American public picked up a copy, either in their homes or in libraries or in bus stations and waiting rooms,” explains Sam Stephenson, who has written two books on W Eugene Smith’s work. “The impact these images had on someone sitting in their living room in New York or Chicago or in a library in a small town anywhere in America is impossible to comprehend today when we all carry cameras in our pockets.”
Now recognised as one of the landmarks of 20th century photojournalism, Country Doctor was a pivotal moment in the development of the extended photo essay. It signalled the beginning of a golden age of editorial photojournalism that would peak in the 1960s and 70s, when such essays by the likes of Don McCullin, Gilles Peress and Eve Arnold brought dramatically affecting images of conflict, protest and political struggle into millions of living rooms.
As print media has suffered a decline in sales and advertising revenue, the photo essay has become an increasingly rare element in contemporary journalism, especially as our digitally driven image-culture feeds our insatiable appetite for short, sharp hits of information.
It was Country Doctor that immediately sprang to mind, though, when a few weeks ago I came upon Italian photographer Lorenzo Meloni’s series about the impact of Covid-19 in Italy. Entitled Silent Squares and the Scent of Death: Scenes From an Italy Laid Low by Coronavirus, and published in Life’s one-time sister magazine, Time, the series stood out in its stillness and solemnity amid the relentless deluge of single, often very similar news photographs of the global emergency.
Including such quietly stunning images as a white hearse waiting in an empty cemetery car park, and a health worker in a hazmat suit taking the temperature of a masked elderly woman in bed, Meloni’s photos seemed firmly rooted in the old-fashioned humanistic documentary tradition that Smith, perhaps more than anyone, believed in and lived by.
“Smith hated bureaucracies and was drawn to individuals that fought for the benefit of others,” says Stephenson. “He saw himself as one and he recognised Dr Ceriani as one also. There was undoubtedly a heroic quality to what Dr Ceriani did and Smith wanted to make that come to the fore for Life’s readers.”
Country Doctor was published in Life the same year that the National Health Service was launched in Britain. In one telling image, Smith shows Ceriani stretched out in his scrubs, exhausted, on an operating table. The text refers to the doctor’s long hours, poor pay and almost impossible workload, describing him as “a physician, surgeon, obstetrician, paediatrician, psychiatrist, dentist, oculist, and laboratory technician” and notes that “his income from covering a dozen fields is less than a city doctor makes by specialising in only one”.
For all that, it was the doctor’s dedication to his calling that transfixed the nation rather than the ethical and economic inadequacies of an American healthcare system that worked him to exhaustion. Eager for all-American everyman heroes, the postwar public found one in the beleaguered but doggedly determined physician, whose quiet heroism seemed in tune with the fragile optimism and lingering uncertainty of the times.
“America was coming out of the torpor of the Great Depression and epic tragedy of human suffering that was world war two,” says Stephenson. “In the pages of Life, people discovered an individual doing some good to make people feel better. The message of these photographs was essentially hopeful.”
One wonders what Smith, a neurotic and notoriously combative character who saw photography as both an art form and a means of highlighting injustice and inequality, made of the media canonisation of Dr Ceriani. We do know that, having spent 23 days tracking the GP’s every move at close quarters and amassing hundreds of shots in the process, he was perhaps inevitably dissatisfied with the Life magazine layout, later saying: “I don’t really like hearing compliments about it. I have stopped looking at it because I see so many defects every time I look at it. It could have been done much better.”
In the 70 years since, though, the Life spread has come to be revered as a well-nigh perfect meeting of images and words. Author and curator David Campany recalls seeing Smith’s prints in a London exhibition in the 1980s and, while appreciating “his sincerity and commitment”, found the work “a little overwrought”. In contrast, the Life photo essay still fascinates him.
“It comprises 27 images and quite a lot of text so it is a much richer and more complex account than we get from the three or four of Smith’s photographs from the series that are now well known. We learn the doctor was something of a rebel, holding out as a general practitioner against forces of specialisation. That’s not immediately obvious from the photos but it’s important.”
For his part, Dr Ceriani found the experience initially demanding but, as with everything else in his life, adapted to it remarkably quickly. Sometimes, as with the portrait of him striding across the field, Smith was not averse to choreographing the shoot for maximum dramatic effect. More often, he simply hovered at Ceriani’s shoulder, photographing him at work, on call, and occasionally relaxing with his family.
“I never made a move that Gene wasn’t sitting there,” Ceriani recalled later. “I’d go to the john and he’d be waiting outside the door, so it would seem. He insisted that I call him when anything happened, regardless of whether it was day or night … He would always be present. He would always be in the shadows.”
Dr Ceriani spent the rest of his working life in Kremmling. He died aged 72. His demanding vocation, which he considered ordinary, was captured for posterity and given the validation it deserved by Smith’s stark, inquiring gaze. One could argue, with hindsight, that Country Doctor had little impact politically, but it radically changed the nature of photographic storytelling in ways that resonate even more deeply in a time of global public health crisis.
• Country Doctor can be found at magnumphotos.com.
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