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Saturday, November 03, 2001

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Skeptics who still question the wisdom of recognizing photography as a fine art medium may change their minds when they visit "Pittsburgh Collects Photographs" at Silver Eye Center for Photography on the South Side.

	At 1015 E. Carson St. through Nov. 24. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday Benedict-Jones and Steven Mendelson will give a gallery talk. At 7 p.m. Nov. 14, Cindy Sherman's 83-minute film "Office Killer" (in video format) will be shown. Admission is free. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and until 9 p.m. Thursday. For information, call 412-431-1810.

The first images encountered are the most recent and hold their own among other contemporary expression. Sandy Skoglund, for example, builds obsessively worked fantasy installations that she photographs. "Body Limits," two figures and a partly revealed blue chair covered with dark and light shadings that call to mind dappled grasslands, at first appears to be an exploration of pattern. And it is. But realizing that the effect is achieved by covering everything with strips of raw bacon adds a new layer to the appreciation of the piece.

Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee make astute commentary on man's negative impact upon the environment, as in "The Blue Lagoon, Svartsengi geothermal hot water pumping station, Porbjorn, Iceland," which contrasts the natural and human presence. But the large format and lush color deliver the message in visually seductive fashion.

Classics abound, as with Eliot Porter's "Redbud Trees in Bottomland. Near Red River Gorge, Kentucky," of 1968, which hasn't lost its sensitive beauty even though it has become ubiquitous as a Sierra Club poster, or an Imogen Cunningham nude study, "Her and Her Shadow," from 1931.

A conversation between Silver Eye Executive Director Linda Benedict-Jones and Concept Art Gallery Director Sam Berkovitz revealed their common desire to "recognize, indeed celebrate, the many private and public collections in Pittsburgh that cherish photography," and soon they were curating an exhibition.

The number of collectors discovered was larger than anticipated -- something Benedict-Jones points out is "encouraging news" for local photographers -- and the selection had to be limited to one contribution from each of 39 collectors. These range from individuals to public and corporate collections.

Benedict-Jones was co-curator of the highly successful "Pittsburgh Revealed" at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1997, and "Collects" invites comparison. But only three of the images in this exhibition -- Luke Swank's "Pressing," John Allen's "Pittsburgh study #4," both from the 1930s, and Orlando Romig's "River Routine" of 1943 -- are of Pittsburgh.

The exhibition complements another Carnegie show, "Dream Street" -- an unprecedented display of the Pittsburgh photographs of W. Eugene Smith -- which opens at the Carnegie today. At Silver Eye is a 1951 Smith photograph from the Carnegie's collection that was part of his nurse-midwife photo-essay for Life magazine.

Similar straightforward social documentation was also championed by other famous names. Walker Evans captured the rural white poor in "Sharecropper's Family, Hale County, Alabama" (1936), Paul Strand made somber eye contact with the "Men of Santa Anna, Michoacan" (Mexico, 1932), and Alfred Stieglitz exposed the cramped quarters of immigrant families in "The Steerage" (1907).

Collecting is a very individualistic endeavor, driven by passion. Some collect a particular subject, photographer or process. For example, Frank Watters, curator of Photo Antiquities on the North Side, specializes in Civil War photographs of Irish soldiers and specifically of Gen. Michael Corcoran, shown with the 69th State Militia in 1861.

The exhibition, coincidentally, is also a compact but richly exemplified history of photography. Moving into the back gallery, the visitor travels back in photographic time, past Heinrich Kuehn's warm "Miss Mary & Lotte," an example of early 20th-century pictorialism that could pass for a charcoal drawing, and concluding with a "Post-Mortem" daguerreotype, a fashionable custom in the mid-1800s.

Silver Eye has assembled a commendable resource book on artists and processes that will flesh out the exhibition for novice and experienced collectors alike.