A Walk to Paradise Garden

W. Eugene Smith photographed his children exhaustively throughout his professional life, and A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946) is, perhaps, the best known of this large and disparate group. The subject, intended as symbolic of the rebirth of society after the destruction of war, was used by the Ford Motor Company and the Mutual Insurance Company of New York for advertising campaigns in the 1950s and Edward Steichen selected it as the final image in his ground-breaking Family of Man exhibition of 1955. The photograph also underpinned Smith's ambitious but unrealized book project, The Total Book (1959-1975), also known as The Walk to Paradise Garden.