In the documentary "Aaronel deRoy Gruber -- A Life in Art," photographer John Fobes tells of a day he and Gruber spent trying to photograph a steel mill. She'd been trying, without success, to gain permission to shoot the Duquesne Works. When they drove by, the gates were open and the two entered.

Security guards appeared within 30 to 45 seconds, but Fobes was able to distract them long enough for Gruber to get the shot she wanted before they were escorted out. For Gruber, it's about achieving "the vision," Fobes says:

"This is what I want. I am going to succeed. I'm going to get the photograph I want despite the roadblocks."

It's a good illustration of the determination that has propelled Gruber's artistic eye, her international reputation and her capacity to be mother, wife, a participating member of the community and full-time artist through a career entering its seventh decade.

Fobes, Gruber's printer, is among many artists, curators, critics, directors and family members who testify to her talent and tenacity in the Kenneth Love documentary, which premiers at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at Carnegie Museum of Art (free).

The film pulls together all of the elements significant to Gruber and is a documentation of a full, well-lived life, not a specifically critical look at her oeuvre.

It is being shown in conjunction with the exhibition "The Analytical Eye: Photographs by Aaronel deRoy Gruber" which opened last weekend at Silver Eye Center for Photography on the South Side.

Curated by critic Graham Shearing and Linda Benedict-Jones, Carnegie curator of photography and former Silver Eye executive director, the exhibition is an intelligent and instructive look at her expression through 58 prints. The earliest is "Hoopla," an artful 1981 image of her granddaughter in a swimming pool that launched her pursuit of photography in earnest by claiming first prize in an exhibition. The most recent is the 2008 "Hydrogenated #1," an oversized inkjet print of a digitally altered image of an exotic houseplant.

Gruber's subject matter varies from Pittsburgh scenes -- the most iconic of which is the 1996 "Downtown Pittsburgh Skyscrapers from Mount Washington" on loan from Carnegie Museum of Art. They range from the "Salt Cities of Mono Lake, Eastern Sierras, California" to the plants of Phipps Conservatory to those collapsed under the weight of the regions's industrial decline.

People are rare, as are self-portraits, but one may catch a glimpse of Gruber occasionally incorporated into an image as shadow or reflection.

It is perhaps her willingness to try new techniques that most propels her artmaking. By toning silver gelatin prints she achieves surfaces with copper shimmer, as in "Brown Palm Frond," or images as fine of line and sensitively represented as an engraving, as is "Last Vestige of J & L."

"Architectural Reflection," on the other hand, is a straight chromogenic print, but an image that only an exceptional eye could have discovered and captured.

Her signature work, well represented in the film and in the exhibition, combines panoramic compositions with the otherworldly effects achieved by using infrared film, such as ghostly landscapes or halos around plants.

Gruber, who was born in 1918 in Pittsburgh, attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and at first made vibrantly colored abstract paintings, followed by critically well-received metal and Plexiglas sculptures.

Barbara Jones, Westmoreland Museum of American Art curator, says in the film that Gruber's recent "Circus Circus" series -- represented at Silver Eye by the large inkjet print "Ghostly Light," a swirling Cirque du Soleil performer abstracted to a swath of reds, purples and blues -- shows the continuity of her aesthetic evolution.

"From her painting," Jones says, "which is all about color and expression, to her kinetic sculpture, which is all about color, light and movement, and then on to color photography, which I think shows the combination of both mediums, and how both mediums have informed the new work. It's really color and light in motion, and I think it's very much like painting with photography."

Each episode has fed the next, while referencing back to all preceding. That ensures that Gruber will continue to create in her ninth decade, and that each body of work will supersede in complexity and depth that which came before.

As Shearing and Benedict-Jones say, at Silver Eye: "It has been no retirement."

"Analytical" continues through June 27 at Silver Eye, 1015 E. Carson St., South Side. Admission is free. Hours are noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Information: 412-431-1810 or silvereye.org. The "A Life in Art" DVD, which also includes a slide show of the Silver Eye exhibition and interviews with Gruber, is available at Silver Eye and the Carnegie.

If you're in Manhattan April 4 you might stop by the opening reception for Pittsburgher Paul Glabicki's solo exhibition of his fabulous new drawing series, "Accounting for...," from 6 to 8 p.m. at Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20 St. (continuing through May 9; 212-229-0044).