Johnny Depp wears an unidentified watch

The photograph is black and white, the way almost everything about W. Eugene Smith was. In Minamata, the 2020 film, Johnny Depp plays the real Smith in 1971, a great Life photographer gone to seed, broke and half-drunk in a New York loft, until one last assignment sends him to a poisoned fishing town in Japan. Here he is in the beret and the wire-rimmed glasses, gray-bearded, lifting a camera to his eye. The camera is a Minolta SR-T 101, a working professional's 35mm, not a showpiece. On the wrist holding it is a watch that matches.

It is a plain watch with a black dial, and the numbers on it are the big, no-nonsense kind, a full ring of Arabic numerals you could read at a glance in bad light. The bracelet is a bright metal multi-link band of the sort that came on a thousand 1970s watches. There is no fluted bezel and no flash, nothing that says money. It is the watch of a man who needs to know the time and does not care to be admired for it.

Which is why it is a little funny that the one published guess about this watch calls it a gold Rolex Day-Date, the boardroom watch. Look closely and that cannot be right. The bracelet is a plain multi-link, not the President band a Day-Date wears, and the big Arabic dial is nothing like a Day-Date's. The idea is wrong for Smith, too, a man who spent his career pointing his lens at the people such watches would rather not see. What is on his wrist is plainer and truer, a watch worn the way he wore his camera. Nobody has ever put a name to it.