DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA.- The Center for Documentary Studies presents "Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photographs," an exhibition of work by one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, through March 30, 2003. Dream Street brings together photographs - 85 will be on display at CDS - from Smith’s epic, unfinished essay of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s. This traveling exhibition marks the first time these photographs, which Smith considered the finest of his career, have been shown together.
In 1955, having just resigned his high-profile but stormy post at Life magazine, Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce 100 photos for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial, Pittsburgh: Story of an American City. Smith stayed a year, compiling nearly 17,000 photographs for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life, his intended magnum opus.
Sam Stephenson, a research associate at CDS, helped assemble the exhibition as a guest curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where the show opened. "Only a fragment of the work was ever seen, despite Smith’s lifelong conviction that it was his greatest set of photographs," says Stephenson. "The bulk of my work over five years has been trying to identify - from all the clues, fragments, and vague blueprints that Smith left behind - the set of some 200 Pittsburgh master prints that he deemed ’the synthesis of the whole.’" CDS will be displaying a smaller version of the original exhibition, which included 195 photographs. After closing in Pittsburgh, the exhibition traveled to the International Center of Photography in New York City and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. "Dream Street is an astonishing, first-ever portrayal, not just of Pittsburgh, but also of America at mid-century, by a master photojournalist," Stephenson adds.
Stephenson became interested in Pittsburgh’s history and character during a visit to the city to meet the family of his fiancée seven years ago and began researching the life and work of Smith. Since then, he has edited two books on the photographer: Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project, published by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with W.W. Norton and Co., and W. Eugene Smith, published by Phaidon Press in its Photography 55 series. Stephenson also wrote the script for the documentary film Brilliant Fever: W. Eugene Smith and Pittsburgh, which will screen at CDS on Thursday, January 23, at 7 p.m. The National Endowment for the Humanities recognized Stephenson’s work and awarded him a fellowship to continue his research on Smith; currently, Stephenson is directing a documentary and oral history project about the New York loft where Smith lived and worked and where jazz greats, such as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Charles Mingus, frequently held all-night jam sessions. Stephenson will present this work, "The Jazz Loft Tapes: W. Eugene Smith’s Obsession with Music," on March 26 at 7 p.m.
Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Portrait
Graphic evidence of the prevailing paradoxes of American life, simultaneous growth and decay, beauty and squalor, generosity and greed, love and hatred, understanding and ignorance. With compassionate camera, he sought to reveal rather than indict. Using Pittsburgh as a mirror, he has caught reflections of America which will both comfort and disturb. - From Eugene Smith’s notes, ca. 1956
Smith believed Pittsburgh was an ideal subject for exposing the conflicts of 1950s America, and he aimed to create a photo essay that captured the complexity both of the city and of the modern world. Assembling these images into a coherent essay grew to represent for Smith the daunting task - perhaps the impossibility- - of creating a definitive _expression of his subject as he saw it. Smith said that his Pittsburgh photographs were the most vital _expression of his life’s work, and yet he judged the project to be an utter failure.
In the mid-1970s, while delivering what would amount to almost a self-eulogy - he would die only a few years later - Smith recalled the Pittsburgh period of his career: "I think that I was at my peak as a photographer in, say, 1958 or so. My imagination and my seeing were both, I don’t know ... ’red hot’ or something. Everywhere I looked, every time I thought, it seemed to me it left me with great exuberance and just a truer quality of seeing. But it was the most miserable time of my life." Dream Street yields a provocative and illuminating perspective on Smith’s creative process and an invaluable portrait of Pittsburgh at the pinnacle of its industrial might.
All of the photographs in Dream Street were taken between 1955 and 1957, and many are iconic images of Pittsburgh. Smoky City, for example, shows newly built office buildings behind a screen of smoke from steel mills, and Dance of the Flaming Coke, catches a steelworker in motion as he handles smoldering material. Other images, such as barges on the Monongahela river, United States Steel’s Homestead Works, hillside houses and staircases, the old Home Plate Café, and the statue of Honus Wagner outside of Forbes Field, depict well-known sights to those who are familiar with Pittsburgh, as it was in the 1950s and as it is now.
Some of the Pittsburgh project photographs evoke a feeling of loneliness and despair, independent of time or place. An old woman sits alone on the steps of a closed store as young people sit and talk above her on the roof, each unaware of the others. A young African American boy hangs tightly to the top of a street pole, his body draped over the sign, "Pride Street." A teenage girl leans against a parking meter at a street carnival and transmits the feeling of melancholy that somehow seems out of place in the optimistic 1950s.
Smith felt the value of his Pittsburgh photographs was to be found in the expressive potential of the organized whole. Many magazines, including Life, were interested in the project, but Smith would not relinquish editorial control of the layout. In fact, he rejected several offers of up to $20,000 because publishers would not allow him control of the essay. Finally, Popular Photography magazine agreed to give Smith 38 pages in its 1959 Photography Annual, paying him only $1,900, but giving him complete control of the layout.
The Photography Annual spread was only a brief representation of Smith’s larger vision, and he considered the published layout, which he aptly titled "Labyrinthian Walk," to be a "debacle" and a "failure." Perhaps doomed from the start in finding a satisfactory place to publicly display the complex essay that he imagined, Smith left behind 1,200 master prints and approximately 6,000 work prints, along with snapshots and sketches of bulletin boards on which his ideas for arrangement of the photos were pinned. Dream Street is organized on Smith’s intentions for the layout, as documented through the sketches and snapshots of the bulletin boards on which he worked out his ideas. The exhibition also is informed by Smith’s own selections and arrangements of Pittsburgh prints that he produced for three retrospectives of his work between 1960 and 1971.
Eugene Smith
Throughout his career, Smith was famous for his powerful images and photo essays, and for his difficult personality. His photo essays gained iconic status, yet his obsessive demands for artistic control of his work, along with the demands he placed on himself, earned him the reputation of a maverick. It was a reputation Smith cherished.
Born in 1918, Smith began his career at the age of 14 as a stringer for newspapers in Wichita, Kansas, his hometown. A photograph of the drought-parched bed of the Arkansas River that he took while still in his teens appeared in The New York Times in 1934. His work earned him a photography scholarship to Notre Dame University, but Smith abandoned his scholarship after the first year to pursue a career in New York City. In the years before World War II, Smith’s fame grew, and his photographs were seen in the nation’s best-known magazines, including Newsweek, Life, Collier’s, and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as in The New York Times. By 1939, Smith was a full-time staff photographer at Life, but he resigned after two years, disappointed with his routine assignments.
World War II brought more exciting subject matter. For Ziff-Davis publishing company, Smith spent two years photographing 16 frontline combat missions in the Pacific theater. In 1944, he rejoined Life and captured the brutal struggles for Guam, Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Iwo Jima. Smith’s craft matured in the three years he spent on the front lines. His images portrayed a tragedy that transcended the drama and horrors of combat, but his career as a war correspondent ended on Okinawa in 1945 when he was struck in the head and left hand by fragments from a Japanese mortar round.
After recuperating for more than a year, Smith returned to Life magazine where he took on more than 50 assignments from 1947 to1954. His photo essays, such as "Spanish Village," depicting the drama of life pared to essentials, "Nurse-midwife," showing nobility amid shocking poverty, and "Country Doctor," about a Spartan life dedicated to healing, and numerous others, are considered major works in the history of photojournalism. Although he gained fame and commanded a high salary at Life, Smith constantly wrangled with editors for artistic control of his work. Arguments grew increasingly vitriolic, and in 1954, Smith quit and joined Magnum, the photographer’s cooperative, which sent him to Pittsburgh on the Lorant assignment.
