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Sunday, December 09, 2001

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

Here's the story of "Dream Street": W. Eugene Smith, one of the country's best-known photographers, gambled his career on the dream of turning 1955 Pittsburgh into a city of symbol and magic, a sweeping statement about America at mid-century, from Smoky City to the Emerald City.

	Pride Street (W. Eugene Smith, Creative Photography , University of Arizona)

He lost big -- professionally, financially, emotionally -- but his remarkable work lives on in the Carnegie Museum of Art's major exhibition of his Pittsburgh project.

Designed by the Carnegie's Linda Battis and Duke University's Sam Stephenson, the display of 193 Smith photos of Pittsburgh between 1955 and 1957 is a heady distillation of the 17,000 images he made here in his obsession to "transmit a sense of the city's character, even unto the spirit and the spiritual."

When Smith was 36, he was Life magazine's star photo essayist, renowned for such works as "Spanish Village," "Nurse-Midwife" and "Country Doctor," but by the end of 1954, he became so frustrated with Life's editors that he quit.

The last straw was the magazine's handling of his Albert Schweitzer essay. Smith believed he had "outgrown Life's present concept of the photographic essay," he later told a magazine editor.

"Smith was a photographer, but he operated like an artist," wrote photo historian Giles Mores. "For him, there was no question of restricting himself to a minor role."

Despite family responsibilities, he simply walked away from the magazine and its big paycheck and offered his services free-lance, through the photography agency Magnum.

	Information on two exhibitions Eugene Smith's "Dream Street" runs through Feb. 10 at the Heinz Galleries of the Carnegie Museum of Art. The exhibit is open from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays. 412-622-3131; http://www.cmoa.org/. Bill Wade's "Pittsburgh's Spirit" runs through Friday at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery in the Purnell Center for the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University. The show is open daily, except tomorrow, from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. 412-268-3618.

The first taker was Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian charmer who had turned his considerable talents as self-promoter into a modest success in America as an editor of coffee-table photo books.

Lorant traded on his stories as a crusading journalist in Nazi Germany, where he was jailed briefly (he hyped the experience into his first book, "I Was Hitler's Prisoner"), and a Continental bon vivant (he told a would-be biographer he'd made love to 400 women, including Marilyn Monroe), to gain the trust of Edgar Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department-store owner.

Of course, Kaufmann was much more than a dry-goods merchant; by the 1950s he was not only the city's cultural giant but also one of its biggest boosters. It was the time of Renaissance I, when the city was attempting to remake itself on a scale bigger than any other city had tried before.

Its middle-aged citizens know the story as well as they know the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty." In fact, the two have a lot in common.

In both, a handsome prince arrives to awaken the sleeper to a new world of promise. Our prince was Richard King Mellon and his court included Mayor David Lawrence and Kaufmann.

These "rulers," as Smith would come to call them, believed Pittsburgh needed a facelift to preserve their economic base, which was jeopardized by the inescapable fact that the place was just too damn ugly to attract new customers. The air was foul, the rivers churned with chemical sludge, the inner city was an ancient slum, and the highway system was barely more than a paved horse track.

The rulers went to work with impressive success. Pittsburgh's fairy tale of hope has some truth to it. The first Renaissance made such remarkable visual progress that it became a national story as well as point of pride for Pittsburghers long used to hearing their city ridiculed:

"It's raining, and I'm in Pittsburgh," observes a depressed character in the 1950s Rod Serling TV play "Requiem for a Heavyweight."

Back then, you couldn't get much lower than that.

Kaufmann believed a "deluxe" book was in order to "show how the city has grown and how it became what it is today," said Lorant in describing how he arrived early in 1955 to produce what became the only book a true Pittsburgher needs, "Pittsburgh: The Story of An American City."

Writer and native Kristin Kovacic recalls that while she was growing up, all of her neighbors "had two books in the house, the Bible and 'Pittsburgh.' " It took Lorant nine years to finish it. Doubleday published it in 1964, six years too late for the bicentennial observance and much too late to suit the organization that paid part of the cost, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

About 50 of the photos are Smith's. Lorant needed the threat of a lawsuit to force Smith to live up to the terms of their contract. That agreement required Smith to produce about 100 photos based on a list of subjects supplied by Lorant, who would pay him $1,200. But the photographer went far beyond Lorant's requirements, and his reluctance to turn over his Pittsburgh work reveals how much of himself he had invested in the project.

In the first edition of "Pittsburgh," most of Smith's photos are in Chapter 10, "Rebirth," the section "by" Lawrence but ghost-written by the late John Robin, who headed the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and Lorant.

Typically, Lorant does not point out that these pictures dated to 1955 and depict a bygone city, but their singularity and strangeness make them like no other photos in the book. He also did not reveal why, despite Smith's maverick reputation, he hired him. Any competent photographer would have served Lorant's purposes, while Smith's work was anything but routine.

	Related Information Take a sentimental journey along W. Eugene Smith's 'Dream Street' Photo essay captures the city's more recent spirit Photojournal of both photographers

"Lorant got Smith in order to trade on his name and the reputation of his photos," said Glenn Willumson, director of museum studies at the University of Florida and formerly of Penn State University.

Lorant expected the photographer to finish the job in two weeks and leave. He offered Smith temporary quarters in the Mount Washington house he rented at 712 Grandview Ave.

He prepared a "shooting script" calling for specific photos of churches, government meetings, universities, museums, WQED-TV, country clubs and other conventional subjects.

Smith had other ideas.

"Gene arrived in a big station wagon," Lorant told the photographer's biographer, Jim Hughes. "When he unpacked it -- one piece of luggage after another -- I said to myself, 'This fellow comes for two weeks?' He brought a Gramophone, records, it seemed like everything in the world."

The Lorant job was just an excuse to give him his first opportunity after Life magazine to work on his own.

"He used Lorant to achieve his own ends," said Alan Trachtenberg, professor of American studies and English at Yale. "By the time he arrived in Pittsburgh, he had something much bigger in mind."

The city that confronted Smith in mid-1955 was an industrial giant dependent on the metal industry, a distinctly urban place of more than 600,000. Visually, it offered him a wealth of striking perspectives, houses clinging to hills, lines of railroad tracks snaking along the river bank, a mix of grimy 19th-century buildings along side gleaming new towers, a multitude of faces reflecting the history of American immigration and, above all, the flames and smoke of steel furnaces.

Smith spent his first two weeks here making few pictures. Instead, with a local guide, Norman Rabinovitz, he roamed the city, observing, taking notes, using a compass to locate the places where light and dark converged.

At some point, he dropped all pretext of being a "photojournalist." He turned his back on the Life magazine school and sought to cut a new path in photography.

"The medium must continue to grow, and I ... intend to help break track to take it there, to take it into potential unlimited," Smith told one of his former Life editors.

With all of Pittsburgh at his fingertips (he had a pass from the city giving him unlimited access), Smith photographed the territory as no other city had ever been photographed by an individual.

Charlee Brodsky, professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon, believes there has never been "any photographer who tried to tell the story of a city like Smith. There's really nothing that encompassing" of a such a specific place.

Her one comparison was the work of August Sander and his photo portrait of Germany.

In his first foray here from April to August 1955, Smith shot perhaps 11,000 photos. Some had to be reshot after cameras and film were stolen from his station wagon that May. The equipment was recovered, but despite a search of city dumps ordered by Mayor Lawrence, the film never turned up.

He returned to his home in Croton, N.Y., leaving Lorant empty-handed. Despite threats and pleas, Smith gave the editor nothing until legal action forced him to hand over about 150 photos a year later.

Now began the second and equally important element of Smith's vision -- the selecting and printing. Fueled by Benzedrine, alcohol and cigarettes, he printed for days and nights at a stretch, altering subtly and blatantly the images he found in Pittsburgh.

Decades after W. Eugene Smith focused his lens on the Hill District's Pride Street sign and a boy perched on it, Post-Gazette photographer Bill Wade happened by and caught a different view: workers dismantling a house by hand. The workers's stance also reflects "Dance of the Flaming Coke" part of a retrospective of Smith's work at The Carnegie Museum of Art. (W. Eugene Smith, Carnegie Museum of Art)

"I print slowly for I print well," he said.

Before the digital age, Smith worked directly with the negatives, the developing chemicals and the lights to get the effects he wanted, occasionally applying a bleach solution for highlights.

The Pittsburgh project would consume the photographer for nearly three years. Despite two Guggenheim fellowships in 1956 and 1957, Smith was destitute, living on loans from friends and eventually abandoning his wife and four children. (He had a fifth child from another relationship.)

He managed two more trips to Pittsburgh, which added 6,000 more negatives to his project.

About 1,200 master prints remain in collections at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and at the Carnegie.

Photography Annual published 88 of them in a layout designed by Smith in 1958 called "Labyrinthian Walk" after talks with Look and, ironically, Life on publication fell through.

"Pittsburgh is dead," Smith wrote after "Labyrinthian Walk" was published to mixed reviews.

Aside from Lorant's book and a smaller exhibition at the Carnegie in the 1980s, Dream Street is the only major display of Smith's Pittsburgh endeavor.

He died in 1978 at 60, burdened by deteriorating health as he struggled to teach a photography course at the University of Arizona obtained largely on his reputation as a photo journalist.

Aside from his alcohol and drug addictions, he had been severely wounded while photographing action in World War II in 1945. In 1972, while documenting the effects of mercury poisoning in Japan, he was badly beaten by workers of the polluting company.

"Minamata," a book completed largely by his second wife, salvaged his reputation as one of America's greatest photojournalists, a contradiction that might have amused Smith.

In photographing Pittsburgh, he sacrificed his career and family to erase that label, but the project proved to be his biggest failure, a "debacle," he told Ansel Adams.

He was wrong. Fifty-six years later, Smith has found his Dream Street at last.