He had "the face of a plumber and the soul of a poet."

This description of Luke Swank was relayed by a relative of the late photographer to Howard Bossen as he was wrapping up his research. Bossen is guest curator of the exhibition "Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer," which opens Saturday at Carnegie Museum of Art, and author of a book by the same title published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Swank photographed "Three Boys in a Wagon" in the mid-1930s. 'Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer' and 'Witness to the Fifties: Selections From the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950-1953' Where: Carnegie Museum of Art. When: Both open Saturday. "Swank" continues through Feb. 5; "Witness" through Feb. 26. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and Nov. 28; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $10, $7 seniors, $6 students/children, members free. Information: 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org. Schedule of events planned in conjunction with the photography exhibitions "Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer," Howard Bossen's keen, fully illustrated biography of Swank with reproductions of 141 of his photographs, was published this year by the University of Pittsburgh Press ($65 hardcover).

The family member, who identified herself as a cousin, said she'd been photographed as a child by Swank and recalled for Bossen the observation made by her mother.

It was a "telling comment," Bossen said during a phone interview Friday. "It kind of crystallized that you've got this guy who's an amazing intellect and an amazing artist."

Swank, who was born in Johnstown in 1890 and as a young man worked in his family's businesses, achieved a national reputation in a short time after beginning a career in photography relatively late in life.

In 1932, his "Steel Plant" was exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in "Murals by American Painters and Photographers" alongside works by the likes of Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen and Charles Sheeler. His work was included eight years later in the inaugural exhibition of MoMA's department of photography. In 1931, he'd been given a solo exhibition by the au courant Julien Levy gallery in New York.

Beaumont Newhall, described by Bossen as one of the eminent historians of photography, chose Swank as his subject for the first issue of U.S. Camera Magazine in 1938.

During World War I, Swank, an Army lieutenant, was assigned to a facility that made "war gasses," where an accident with a poison gas canister resulted in hospitalization and chronically affected his health. His ongoing frailty combined with high blood pressure contributed to a heart attack that resulted in his death in 1944 at age 54.

After his early death, Swank's name, and work, passed into obscurity.

Bossen, a professor of journalism and adjunct curator at the Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, was the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University for 2001-02 when he happened upon Swank's photographs in the Carnegie collection. Amazed at the quality of the work and puzzled that he hadn't previously heard of Swank, he proposed a project to Carnegie Museum.

Linda Batis, who was at the time Carnegie's associate curator of fine arts, worked with Bossen on the Swank exhibition. The vast majority of the 141 images they selected for the exhibition are of Western Pennsylvania.

Nearly all of them are also vintage prints, "all printed by Luke Swank, many signed and penciled by Luke Swank," Batis says. "Not only do you have the image, but you have the prints the way he wanted them to look. I think that's very important -- a feature of photography that many don't realize."

The exhibition format follows that of the book, and photographs are presented in six sections: "Steel," mostly shot in the Bethlehem Works, Johnstown; "Circus," probably taken during the early 1920s around Johnstown; "People," including images of Eastern Pennsylvania Amish and of Swank's wives, Grace and Edith, the former of whom died of cancer in 1937; "Transformations," described by Batis as "very abstract photographs or ordinary objects"; "Rural Photographs," mostly from his later period when he traveled with Edith; and "Urban" scenes, almost entirely of Pittsburgh.

But even more than of a place, they are of an era.

And beyond that, Bossen and Batis both emphasize, they are a representation of a prominent photographer and his work, a statement of a refined modernist sensibility, the substantiation of Swank's interpretation of the world around him; they convey his emphasis, catalog his achievement and ultimately comprise his claim to inclusion in the history books.

Swank's "Man Crossing City Street," circa 1935, is unusual because Swank usually photographed residents in neighborhoods.

"Swank's images are both emotive and representational," Bossen says. "You clearly get a sense of time and place when you look at Swank's photographs." But Bossen doesn't mean a specific address. "We get a sense of time, we get a sense of culture, we get a sense of the people.

"Most of his work is done in Western Pennsylvania, but it's fundamentally not about that." It has the universality, Bossen argues, of the photographs of Walker Evans or Berenice Abbott. "[Swank] happened to be photographing where he lived."

"It's important that we think about the work in a way that extends beyond the boundary of the region where he made the images," Bossen says. "What the project is really trying to do is get Swank back on the national stage -- be considered as one of the important photographers of that period."

As to its long-term success, "if students study the history of American photography and Swank is back among those he belongs with, then I guess I've done the job," Bossen says. "He's not there, and he once was there."

National exposure to Swank's oeuvre and life through this exhibition and book should make it apparent that some updating of the textbooks is in order.