Here's a secret: We photographers dream that our work will forever be studied and admired. For most of us, fate is just and wise; our pictures serve a specific purpose and then disappear.

		"LUKE SWANK: MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHER" By Howard Bossen University of Pittsburgh Press ($65)

In the case of Luke Swank, however, fate was cruel, perhaps even foolish. Other photographers of his time and talent went on to great fame, and their work is now considered important to both art and history. Not Swank.

Swank was one of the best photographers of his (or any) era. His pictures were exhibited with those of artists like Margaret Bourke-White, Imogene Cunningham, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston.

Swank worked throughout the late 1920s and '30s, and established himself as an important and influential photographer. Then, in 1944, he died, and all of his pictures seemed to vanish.

A new book by Howard Bossen, a journalism professor and adjunct curator at the Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University, goes a long way toward reintroducing us to Swank and his work.

It's a hefty edition that tells us about Swank's life, gives context to the man's work and beautifully reproduces more than 140 of his images.

Swank's career, as revealed by Bossen, was brief but brilliant. He was born in Johnstown in 1890, less than a year after the town's infamous flood, and spent much of his early adult life working for family businesses.

Although he was interested in photography as a youth, he didn't become serious about it until the mid-1920s.

Success came quickly. By the early 1930s, Swank's work was being exhibited at photographic salons in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

At the time, he was still selling automobiles in his family's Buick dealership.

By 1932, his five-part photo mural, "Steel Plant," was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the first exhibit at the museum to include photography.

Swank focused his camera on a variety of subjects -- circuses, steel mills, Amish children, still-life arrangements, weathered buildings in rural Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh.

He's known as a Modernist because his pictures were carefully composed, sharp and precise. Strong geometric elements define many of his images. Swank used fences, buildings, windows, light and even the human form as framing devices.

The pictures Swank produced are by turn pleasant and challenging, rueful and playful. A few are disturbing, although not overtly.

For example, most of Swank's circus clown pictures are playful, with the subjects mugging for the camera and displaying their stage personalities.

One tightly composed portrait, however, plays a visual trick; if you look closely, you notice that this particular smile is only grease paint. Behind the facade is an expression that is stern, perhaps even suggesting impatience.

Clearly, Swank was a photographer fascinated by the medium. Some of his steel-mill pictures and still lifes are exercises in composition and light. The subjects are rendered as abstractions. Other pictures veer in different directions.

Two images of steel workers pouring molten iron into molds are among the most stunning and lyrical pictures made of the steel-making process.

His later photographs of rural architecture show Swank to be a maturing artist experimenting with his compositions and often using softer light.

The most interesting and complex photographs, however, are those made in Pittsburgh. Swank shot pictures of Strip District markets, the Downtown business district, North Side neighborhoods and alleys and storefronts around the city.

In these pictures, the city appears as a stage, framed by buildings, brick roads, telephone poles, fences, awnings, signs, even laundry hanging on a line.

People are occupants, or players on the stage. They are relaxed, unaware of the camera. With hands in pockets, they casually lean against posts, they stand in doorways and chat with each other, they walk purposefully across Liberty Avenue, some glancing sideways, checking for oncoming streetcars.

A woman stands, waiting impatiently with her arms crossed.

In these pictures, Pittsburgh is a place of real people who bought live poultry, fresh liver and pig tails at Logan Meat Market.

They sat outside on a ledge and smoked Phillip Morris cigarettes that cost 15 cents a pack.

These pictures invite you to enter and explore. It's a worthwhile venture. As your eyes wander through these images, you discover the childlike graffiti on a clapboard wall, the row of clothespins clamped to the rim of a box ("50 for 10 cents," reads a partially hidden sign), the dented fender of a vintage car parked on the street. (In one picture there is a small sign, "Please Do Not Park Here," which obviously predates the Pittsburgh tradition of using chairs to reserve parking spaces.)

Such details are revealing and create a sense of intimacy with the picture's time and place. You find yourself looking deeper and perhaps asking questions:

What are those two women discussing so intently as they stand in the doorway of a grocery store? What is it, out of the frame, that has caught the attention of those men on the street corner? Is that woman sitting at the table and biting her fingernail nervous or mournful?

These are pictures that have become more than art and more than documentation. They connect us -- as people, and as inhabitants of this place called Pittsburgh -- to the past in a way that's at once frighteningly real and exhilarating.

You recognize the body language, the attitude, the facial expression, the curiosity, the wistfulness, because you have seen and experienced it yourself, on these same streets, 50 or 60 or 70 years later.

Was this Swank's intent? It's impossible to know. But the beauty of photography as practiced by people like Swank is that the work can have unintended and unpredictable consequences.

His best images communicate on a number of levels, depending on the viewer's sensitivity and prejudices. Bossen has done us a favor by bringing them to our attention.