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Legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith called his signature project, simply, “Pittsburgh.” As in “Pittsburgh is a failure” and “the infinite mistake of Pittsburgh.”
What got him so down? In the 1950s, author Stefan Lorant needed photos for a new book celebrating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial. Smith was a mercurial, New York City-based former World War II combat photographer who had just quit Life magazine. Lorant hired him to spend three weeks here and produce 100 prints.
Lorant got his prints — many known to generations of Pittsburghers from that coffee-table doorstop titled “Pittsburgh: An American City” — but Smith barely knew when to stop.
During his initial stay, in 1955, he became obsessed with the city and documenting it. He roamed from coal mines and steel mills to dusty city sidewalks, pristine public plazas and the steps of the Duquesne Club. He visited multiple times more through 1957, bent on producing a grand, symphonic and likely unprecedented work of photographic art.
Smith never managed it, at least to his own satisfaction. Ultimately, he shot 22,000 exposures. He included a few hundred of them in a 38-page essay published in a photography magazine in 1959, but hated how it turned out.
Smith died in 1978; his work here got a fuller airing with the 2001 publication of "Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project," a 180-page selection of 175 black-and-white photos and accompanying text edited by Sam Stephenson (with help from folks at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the latter of which holds the rights to many of Smith’s Pittsburgh images).
The book went out of print, but Stephenson and the University Chicago Press have produced a new edition. And on Nov. 17, Riverstone Books will host Stephenson in a virtual conversation with award-winning poet Ross Gay, who wrote the forward to the new edition.
It’s a marvelous collection. Others had memorably photographed the city at mid-century, of course, from Johnstown native Luke Swank, in the 1930s and ’40s, to Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented the Black community here for half of the 20th century. And under the guidance of Roy Stryker, shooters for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library — including talents like Clyde Hare and Esther Bubley — made thousands of images of the city and its people just a few years before Smith arrived.
But Smith’s project is surely the most extensive collection of photos of Pittsburgh conceived in such a brief time period by a single artist. Especially when that artist had relieved himself of obligation to any sort of deadline, or to anything but his vision. Stephenson calls it “the most ambitious project of a major photographer’s career.”
On one page of “Dream Street,” the grand, Ionic-columned interior of Downtown’s old Mellon National Bank, shot from above, is juxtaposed with a separate, street-level image of men standing alongside a message soaped onto a labor union’s storefront window, “No work until further notice.” A police officer in clown makeup at a Shriners parade greets a group of Black children on the Sixth Street Bridge. Steelworkers jovially drink beer and play cards at a picnic. The mills’ fires glow in smoky, artificial twilight. And always, the city’s gruffly photogenic landscape, its steep slopes and river valleys interrupted by the sometimes bold, sometimes desperate assertions of human habitation and industry.
As Smith puts it, “We are so lucky today to have this portrait of America’s primary industrial city at its zenith,” before suburbanization — let alone deindustrialization — fully took hold.
Stephenson originally assembled “Dream Street” while working at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies; more recently, he published the 2017 biography “Gene Smith’s Sink” and learned much more about the famed photographer, including how influenced he was by pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who had his own long-standing association with Pittsburgh. The two were friends, and Stephenson thinks the “cinematic quality to what Smith was trying to achieve in Pittsburgh was partly down to Brakhage.
Stephenson, who now lives in College Station, Texas, was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction writing to support a rather different project, on the cultural impact of alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction. He also ghostwrote singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’ new memoir, “The Secrets I Told You.”
But W. Eugene Smith, and Pittsburgh, remain abiding interests.
The Pittsburgh project was “a failure in Smith’s eyes but not in our eyes,” said Stephenson. “I think he was kind of caught in a bind of his own making” in that there was no way to finish it as he wished. He adds, “I think Smith was really going after poetry instead of journalism.”
