Customer Reviews

Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project, 1955-1958

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sam Stephenson's dedication and perseverance to bringing W. Eugene Smith's immense "Pittsburgh Project" into view deserves unstinting kudos, praise and thanks from every viewer and photographer who has ever wondered about Smith's Pittsburgh project and asked themselves: "I wonder what happened during those four years? And what about the thousands (15,000? 17,000? 20,000?) of photographs he took?" This book has most of the answers, and while Alan Trachtenberg's essay is very informative, it is Stephenson's documentary digging, discovering, editing and yes, dreaming about what Smith intended that makes this volume so valuable.

So why four, instead of five stars? Some technical printing issues and editorial choices about presentation. To wit:

1) The reproduction of the photos is just so-so. Blacks not saturated, whites are gray, the image surface is flat. Smith's prints sing; the book's reproductions only hum. I know high-quality printing would make the book cost ten times as much. It would be worth it for everyone who has never seen a Smith exhibition print.

2) The individual notes on the photographs are all collected together at the end of the book. I know this is a cost issue -- but it's darned annoying to constantly flip back and forth to read the notes about the images, rather than scan them while in the flow. Smith's photographs form a narrative, and the words and captions are important, even if Smith himself didn't always think so.

3) There are not enough examples of Smith's working style. I saw some of his contact sheets from this project -- they are amazing! So are his work prints. More documentation on how he shot, printed, edited and re-edited his work would be a help in understanding both the successes and failures of this Sisyphean project. Stephenson does a good job writing about this process, but more examples of the work product images would make it much more powerful. It's still pretty powerful stuff!

If you don't know about W. Eugene Smith or this famous "failed" project, there are lots of published resources about the man and his images, such as Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith, His Life and Photographs or Great Photographic Essays from Life. But this book is the ONLY in-depth look at this particular Smith undertaking, and more important, the only attempt to re-create the flow of one of the greatest -- however flawed -- photo essays of all time. Even Jim Hughes' exhaustive and emotionally exhausting biography of Smith W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance : The Life and Work of an American Photographer does not provide the details and context Stephenson provides, nor the photos themselves.

W. Eugene Smith's images influenced my life and work from the late '60s onward, including my first career as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist. Even so, I never met the man. Aside from his published photographs in books and magazines, I encountered his photographs up close three times -- and all three involved the Pittsburgh essay images.

The first time was his exhibit of 600+ images at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970. The whole building was filled with his enormous, meticulous black-and-white prints -- Wagnerian in their visual and emotional impact. Many of the best-known Pittsburgh images were there, glowing with Smith's trademark printing technique of deep blacks and brilliant white highlights -- they were truly operatic in scale and visual and emotional intensity.

The next encounter was at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh a few years later. I casually asked the reference librarian in the photo archives area if they had other pictures of the city besides the historical images on file, and she handed me a looseleaf binder with some prints spilling out of it. I nearly fainted! There were dozens of Smith's famous 5x7 work prints stuffed into the binder, together with a small selection of larger "publication" prints for reproduction. Maybe these had been passed on to the library by Stefan Lorant, who originally gave Smith the assignment to make some photos in Pittsburgh? I don't know. It was like discovering DaVinci sketches shoved under a park bench.

Among them were three or four variations of the backlit image of a woman viewing a map at a city council meeting, and I studied them closely because I recognized the one Smith preferred. I had seen it published many times and at the exhibit in New York -- it's in this book as well. The small prints were the intermediate stage Smith used for editing and layout, and from which he selected his final exhibition or publication prints.

I sat until closing time looking at the variations of particular images -- versions he liked but ultimately rejected -- or about which he just couldn't make up his mind. When I returned the binder I told the librarian" "Take good care of these, they're very valuable!" "Really? I thought they were just snapshots," she replied. I hope they are still there.

My final encounter with the Pittsburgh essay was some 25 years later, after Smith's death and his archives had been acquired by the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. I managed to spend an afternoon there with a stack of his contact sheets. After some 30 years of looking, I got to see all the way back into Smith's shooting style. How he explored a subject with multiple views and approaches, and how he could grab a quick snapshot when all the elements came together in that instant. He was the master of the long form photo essay and also of that "decisive moment." I was awed by what I saw in those contacts -- and I wish Stephenson and the publishers could have found a bit more space to show some of them to the rest of us.

Maybe they'll go online someday. Maybe.

If you love great black-and-white photography, the long-form photo essay, the 1950s, Pittsburgh and all that has vanished from America since that time, Dream Street will give you something to look at and think about. Yes, and dream, too.

Pittsburgh -- the smoky city at the end of an era -- Snap shots frozen in time through a sensitive and interpretative lens.

Smith's book provides a true insight into the people, business and architecture of the Pittsburgh of the late Fifties. These were the days when Mayor Davey Lawrence was setting about to destroy and forget the old, ushering in the new. Steel was still king with its blast furnaces spewing smoke. Street cars still rumbled through city streets.

For the reader interested in the nostalgia of the times, for those seeking the artistry of the lens, for the serious student of metropolitan evolution this book is a must read!

This collection of photograph shows what Pittsburgh was like while the steel mills functioned there. But the images capture all facets of life in Pittsburgh during this era, not just life in the mills. For example, you will see a couple playing shuffleboard at the Fox Chapel Country Club and contrast that with street scenes of poor neighborhoods. You'll see the fine old Mellon Bank building in dowtown Pittsburgh and the Duquesne Club nearby. The pictures of men laboring near the furnaces of Pittsburgh's steel mills portray the lives these men led in contrast.

I also enjoyed the pictures of Forbes Field and its envrions, the former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The book includes a wonderful picture of "Home Plate Cafe" and the home of the "Original Kolbassi Sandwich."

The pictures are beautifully reproduced. The book is reasonably priced consudering the quality of what you get. The photography is superb.

If you know Pittsburgh, it is a trip down memory lane. If you don't know what Pittsburgh was then like, this book will show you.

The Pittsburgh project gallery (shown in Pgh and other cities this year) is a fantastic display of nearly 200 prints that comprise one of the most important works of a great photographer. While reproductions hardly do justice to most fine prints, I recommend this book as a companion to the show, as well as a way to view the work if you are not able to see the gallery at one of the few cities in which it appears. I grew up in Pittsburgh, though long after these shots were taken. It is a spectacular look at mid-century Pittsburgh, and mid-century America.

Simply astounding. As a former Pittsburgher I was familiar with the locations of Smith's photos and with much of the genre of Pittsburgh related documentary photography. (Smith was doing this work in PGH when my father was an undergrad at Pitt, so it is also nice to get another look at that era).

But, you should not own this book for sentimental reasons. You should own it because it is simply some astonishingly vivid B&W photography. (See also Robert Frank's The Americans. These folks were utterly in charge of their craft and working all on their own.) An amazing rush to look at, Smith's photos make you to get out your camera bag and get to work. It totally reenergized my own B&W work.

DREAM STREET is a book about two tragic heroes: W. Eugene Smith and the City of Pittsburgh. Smith was a great photographer who wanted to do much more than take technically accomplished and aesthetically moving photographs. He wanted to change the world and he also wanted to create a magnum opus that would be for the medium of photography what Joyce's "Ulysses" was for literature or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was for music. (Smith also was as driven and socially maladjusted as James Joyce and Ludwig van Beethoven.) By the end of 1954, he probably was the most widely-known and highly regarded photojournalist in the United States, by virtue of years of work for "Life". But Smith and commercial interests, as represented at the magazine, were incompatible, and Smith quit in a self-righteous huff.

The first free-lance assignment Smith was offered after resigning from "Life" was to produce 100 prints for a book commemorating the bicentennial of Pittsburgh - a "chamber of commerce"-type exercise in civic boosterism and self-congratulation. The man who hired him expected it would take Smith three weeks. Smith arrived in Pittsburgh in March 1955 and spent the next month reading about and exploring the city and parts of the next two years taking more than 17,000 negatives. His Pittsburgh project was to be his "Ulysses", his Ninth Symphony. Via a photo-essay of epic proportion, Smith wanted to show, in general, "the relationship of industrial to man" and, more specifically, to portray the city of Pittsburgh in all its diversity as "a living entity", a single organism. He never was able to wrestle the project into a form that was remotely satisfactory to him. (Eighty-eight of his Pittsburgh pictures were published in 1959 by "Popular Photography", but Smith was extremely unhappy with the piece.) When he died, he left behind the 17,000 negatives, as well as 6,000 5 x 7 work prints, and over 1200 master prints.

Fifty years later, DREAM STREET gives us an idea of what Smith was trying to achieve. Editor James Stephenson selected 145 photographs of Smith's Pittsburgh photographs and assembled them into ten portfolios. The book also contains two essays on Smith and his Pittsburgh Project, one by Stephenson, the other by Alan Trachtenberg, as well as a handful of snippets from writings by Smith on his objectives and aspirations (some of which flirt with incoherent nonsense).

The book is not altogether satisfactory. The quality of the photographic reproductions is less than ideal, details on each individual picture are inconveniently provided via four pages of notes at the end of the volume, the content of several of the portfolios (especially the last one of street signs) becomes redundant, and too many pages contain two photographs per page (one such page would have been too many, and there are more than two dozen). In general, the book has a cluttered feel. But something is better than nothing, and DREAM STREET does contain some remarkable, and unforgettable, images.

The book also constitutes a special portrait of Pittsburgh. Those who originally hired Smith wanted to celebrate and glorify Pittsburgh, which then was still a swaggering and bellowing industrial city. But Smith had a highly sensitive social conscience, he was an all-caps LIBERAL, and by his choice of subjects and the manner in which he photographed them he instead highlighted and personified the social costs of unfettered industrial capitalism. Pittsburgh might have been the Steel City (and many of Smith's photographs attest to that moniker) but it also was a collection of people who stoically, though sometimes fearfully and desperately, went on trying to eat, play, drink, and simply live amidst all that toil. Smith's photographs do indeed depict "the relationship of the industrial to man" and it is plain the pole that Smith identified with. Coincidentally, several days ago I saw an Internet piece that touted Pittsburgh as presently the most liveable city in the United States. Were we able to resurrect W. Eugene Smith, it would be interesting to see whether he and his cameras would support that claim.

For those interested in Pittsburgh of the 1950s, or those who are devotees of the work of W. Eugene Smith, the book certainly warrants five stars. For others, I think four stars is more appropriate.

I'm a Pittsburgh native, though I was born after the pictures were made. Still, I found Dream Street to be an interesting perspective on my hometown. Smith's special gift is looking beyond the typical "beauty shots"- the Pittsburgh skyline, the parks, etc., and capturing images that create a strong feeling of the local neighborhoods and their residents. While the topology of Pittsburgh creates strong local neighborhoods, it's the mix of residents that really gives it character. Local restaurants, the alleys and streets of some of the less glamourous sections of the city, and the sense of history and grandeur of Mellon Bank downtown. This book is a great opportunity to step into the past and feel the grit of a true industrial city. Smith's personal genius - and his demons- heavily influnce the project. We're fortunate to be able to benefit from his views after the fact. Special credit has to go to the editors for wading through the 17,000 images Smith shot to get down to the highlights for this book.

Dream Street will not win you over with its elegant aesthetics or even with "decisive moments," as might the work of other famous photographers. This is more like the kind of photography that Robert Penn Warren or Edgar Lee Masters might have created if they took pictures. Smith is a humanist whose pictures reveal the fabric of the lives of everyday people. My favorite pictures include the grimacing zoning commissioners and the hopeful faces of young veterans. Smith complements his photographs of people with compelling landscapes that show how people and machines interacted in this unique industrial ecosystem.
The pictures come with a text that explains the unusual story behind the creation of this essay. Like a few other geniuses, Smith was not adept at meeting the demands of his mortal peers. The original impetus for this work came from Life Magazine, who asked for a short term assignment about the region. Smith missed his deadline and ended up staying on to make pictures for several years! A set of galley layouts reveal the way that Smith conceptualized the important parts of his work, from sections such as "money and commerce" to "alone in the city." The text explains how his vision was compromised by the format of magazines. Even when more than 80 images were finally published with Smith's edit in Popular Photography, the photographer still viewed the result as a failure. The reader of this book will see that Smith was wrong about his efforts. Instead, this pictures make a great historical document about the life of a city.

It's amazing what nearly half a century of prospective and hindsight makes on the opinion of a great photographer's work. This reviewer first saw 88 pages of this work in the "1959 Popular Photography Annual" essay called "Labyrinthian Walk." In that publication, W. Eugene Smith had total editorial control of the text, photos, layout and editing of his masterpiece. As a young teenager new to photography and photojournalism, I was fawning over the Pittsburgh images by one of the world's universally acclaimed photojournalists who had already gained mythic stature because of his stubborn and public maverick tendencies. Smith had taken some of the best war photographs ever made. They were so good they almost looked like the still photographs from Hollywood war movies. They weren't, they were real and from actual battlefields of the South Pacific. He was badly wounded taking some of them. Smith had helped pioneer the development of the picture story in "Life" Magazine's stories about the Country Doctor, the nobility of a South Carolina black nurse-midwife, the Spanish Village and his coverage of Albert Schweitzer and his African Hospital among others.
Leaving his high-paying job as a staff photographer for "Life" because of battle royals with the picture magazine's editors over control of his picture story layouts, design and text, in 1955 Smith took a three-week Magnum Agency assignment to illustrate a book by Stefan Lorant commemorating the bicentennial and the "Renaissance of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania." Smith was anxious to prove to the "Life" magazine editors and management that he could produce a revolutionary new form of photographic essay. Since he was going to Pittsburgh he decided to prove his theory on his coverage of that city. As this fancy and detailed 2001 photographic catalogue for the exhibition "Dream Street. W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project," organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art illustrates, this three plus year shooting project obsessed Smith. His addiction to "excessive amounts of alcohol and amphetamines, especially Benzedrine" didn't help him. Smith became fascinated with what "he called `vistas of melancholy.'"
"The haunting and paradoxical elements of the modern world--elements that had been building in his photography since the war--were on full display in Pittsburgh: glory and despair, production and destruction, past and present, human and machine, the individual and the collective, the natural and the man-made. Smith called these `equilibriums of paradox.' In his notes, Smith wrote, `In all travels, all experiences, I have seldom so felt the contradictions."
Smith took more than 17,000 negatives trying to produce his "Ulysses-scale (the novel not the Epic Greek hero) or a Beethoven symphony caliber photography essay. As he later admitted, he failed in his attempt. His goal was an impossible one. His approach was confused as well. In some ways he was attempting to do a photographic essay that knocked capitalism and Pittsburgh's captains of banking and industry, but his photograph, at least those published ones, didn't show that. He didn't have the Lewis Hine exploitation of children by capitalism images or subjects. His pictures, even the ones with happy, smiling faces (and there weren't many of those) were dark and printed in such a way as to make them seem melancholy. In some strange way his Pittsburgh pictures reminded me of the "film noir" appearance of Helmut Newton's erotic nudes who never seemed to smile even if the viewer of the pictures did. The pictures and prints always had a dark, mysterious or forbidding overtone to them.
His feelings of exploitation didn't come across in his photographs although several of the individual photographs in the essay are indeed masterpieces of still photography. Perhaps if Smith's medium had been cinematic he could have achieved the goal he so clearly saw? Or perhaps his mental goal was indeed an impossible one? Fritz Lang's 1927 epic film "Metropolis" seemed to contain some of the same feelings and message that Smith was apparently seeking. "That film's central theme of workers revolting against domination by exploitative management, their soulless machines, and the new technologies" also had a dark, depressing texture to all the images. Even the film "Brazil" may have contained the ideas that Smith was seeking, but that recent film didn't come out until long after Smith had completed his epic essay and had passed from this world.
As Alan Trachtenberg so expertly points out in the book, "Smith cracked under the pressure of Pittsburgh in part because he made ultimate demons on the possibilities of the essay form as a vehicle of high individualist art...What he wanted was, in short, the opportunity to produce a major interpretive work, a treatise-sized essay on man, machine, and society....In smith's private writings during his Pittsburgh agon flows the passion of a visionary, hysteria drives his need to be a `symbolization of the universal.'"
Smith came closer to his photographic essay goal in a joint project done late in his life about the results of industrial pollution on the residents of a Japanese fishing village of Minamata, and showed the long-term environmental industrial mercury poisoning of the local population. If he'd had a better idea of exactly what approach to take with Pittsburgh he probably would have concentrated his shooting to subjects that were being harmed or at least overwhelmed by Pittsburgh Industrial Transformation--like Lewis Hine did earlier with his child labor expose.
In many ways the most important result of Smith's Pittsburgh Project was the set of beautifully printed handmade black and white photographs. Both Minor White and Ansel Adams would have been (were) pleased as punch.
Even if Smith was correct in his feeling that he had failed in his attempt, even his failure is worth studying. It is a magnificent failure.

This book does a great job in documenting not only W. Eugene Smith's four years of extensive research and photographing Pittsburgh, PA but it also reveals a torment man's struggle in trying to capture something that we will never understand since his 6000 photographs of Pittsburgh set a standard for not only documenting a city but he also raise the bar in the artistic expression of black & white photography. The prints of Smith's work in this book are very good and edited quite nicely, included are some of the photograper's letters to his friend and relatives revealing the thoughts of a troubled genius in words that show he could have been a great writer, too.