The Legacy of an Angry Man With a Camera : Photography: PBS documentary paints a powerful picture of the uncompromising W. Eugene Smith. His photo essays are still worth 10,000 words.

It may be that obsession is the price of a place in history. W. Eugene Smith may have been more obsessed with the purity, the possibilities and the power of the photograph than anyone in modern times.

And the images from his photo essays--of men at war, of the life of a country doctor in Colorado and of Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa, of life and death in a Spanish village and a Japanese city poisoned by industrial pollution, of Pittsburgh and a black midwife in the South--remain indelible in the minds of all those who have seen them.

Smith died in 1978 at the age of only 59 after a fall in a Tucson grocery story. He hit his skull, which was still fragile from a beating he received from guards at the plant in Minamata, Japan, that was poisoning the town. At his death, Smith, as his biographer Jim Hughes has noted, had $18 in the bank, although an archive celebrating his work was already prepared.

“W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult,” a 90-minute documentary in the PBS “American Masters” series, airs Sunday night at 10 on KCET Channel 28. Produced by Kirk Morris, directed by Gene Lasko and written by Jan Hartman, the program uses actor Peter Riegert (“Crossing Delancey”) to play Smith and to say the words the photographer wrote in his voluminous letters and journals.

The ambitious documentary follows Smith’s footsteps to Colorado, the Spanish village and elsewhere, giving additional weight to the words. The imposture was necessary because photographers tend to see and not be seen, although there is a montage of stills of Smith himself, toughly handsome in his early days, at the end of the program.

Smith’s redoubtable mother, Nettie, was herself a photographer and became his mentor as well as his parent as he grew up in Wichita. He was a photographer himself by 14 and widely published by 21. In one voice-over from a tape by Smith, he admits that the possibility of excitement drew him to photography originally but that he quickly came to see how it could be used to record powerful and important truths.

He became an uncompromising loner who broke with Life, his principal outlet, when the magazine cut two pages from his story on Schweitzer. He shot a monumental essay on Pittsburgh, taking something like 50,000 pictures, and although he was effectively broke he withdrew the story from Life because he and the editors could not agree on the layouts.

Smith sold his house, left his family and moved into a loft on lower Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, painting most of the windows black and living like a sort of clockless hermit amid his gear and his records. To keep his cameras busy he photographed what he could see on the street below.

The pictures became what may have been his last essay in Life. I was asked to write the captions and I went over to the loft, where he had the pictures strung across the room as if from a clothesline, in the relative sizes he wanted them to be. Although he was already a legend for his thorny independence, he briefed me firmly but pleasantly about the pictures. If he liked or disliked the words that finally appeared, he never said.

The program talks to many of Smith’s colleagues, including a wire service reporter who first knew him on Okinawa, where Smith caught some shrapnel in his face. (The camera he was looking through may have saved his life). Edward K. Thompson, then the managing editor of Life, talks regretfully about the difficulties of working with a man he clearly liked and admired but who could not accept that the magazine had its own unavoidable imperatives.

Smith’s son, one of his four children, speaks ruefully of the father he scarcely knew, and who had sacrificed the family to his obsessive vision of his work. Another of the sources is Jim Hughes, whose monumental biography, “W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance,” was published last fall (McGraw-Hill: $29.95) and will likely remain the definitive source on the life and work.

There are glimpses of something like 600 of Smith’s photographs in the television special. Many of them flash by quickly, others are mused over as you might pause before a great painting.

It is not possible to look at the work without a feeling of melancholy, and not only for Smith’s difficult and troubled life. (His dominating mother went along on his first honeymoon and, when a motel clerk asked how many rooms were required, said just one.)

What is also true is that the black-and-white photo essay was to a large extent another casualty of television. The picture essay from the high days of Life and Look had an immediacy and a penetration and could, as Smith knew, communicate the emotional truth of reality, in a way that even motion pictures (newsreels, documentaries) could not.

“I frequently have sought out those who were in the least position to speak for themselves,” Smith once wrote. “I can comment for them, if I believe in their cause, with a voice they do not possess.”

He got to the core of lives. The country doctor in Colorado, still robed after surgery, sipping a cup of coffee and staring into space, hollow-eyed with fatigue, is the picture worth 10,000 words, or a novel.

Smith was the last angry photographer, a man hard on those around him but harder on himself. He was wounded physically and emotionally, drained by his pursuit of a private impossible dream of the ultimate communication. It cost him everything, except a place in history.