The Center for Documentary Studies presents Magnum Opus of One of the 20th Century's Greatest Photojournalists

January 10 – March 30, 2003
Opening Reception: Friday, January 17, 6-8 p.m.

Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photographs, an exhibition of work by one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, will be on view at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) from January 10 through March 30, 2003. Dream Street brings together photographs – 85 will be on display at CDS – from Smith’s epic, unfinished essay of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s. This traveling exhibition marks the first time these photographs, which Smith considered the finest of his career, have been shown together.

In 1955, having just resigned his high-profile but stormy post at Life magazine, Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce 100 photos for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial, Pittsburgh: Story of an American City. Smith stayed a year, compiling nearly 17,000 photographs for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life, his intended magnum opus.

Sam Stephenson, a research associate at CDS, helped assemble the exhibition as a guest curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where the show opened. "Only a fragment of the work was ever seen, despite Smith’s lifelong conviction that it was his greatest set of photographs," says Stephenson. "The bulk of my work over five years has been trying to identify – from all the clues, fragments, and vague blueprints that Smith left behind – the set of some 200 Pittsburgh master prints that he deemed ‘the synthesis of the whole.’" CDS will be displaying a smaller version of the original exhibition, which included 195 photographs. After closing in Pittsburgh, the exhibition traveled to the International Center of Photography in New York City and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. "Dream Street is an astonishing, first-ever portrayal, not just of Pittsburgh, but also of America at mid-century, by a master photojournalist," Stephenson adds.

Stephenson became interested in Pittsburgh’s history and character during a visit to the city to meet the family of his fiancée seven years ago and began researching the life and work of Smith. Since then, he has edited two books on the photographer: Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project, published by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with W.W. Norton and Co., and W. Eugene Smith, published by Phaidon Press in its Photography 55 series. Stephenson also wrote the script for the documentary film Brilliant Fever: W. Eugene Smith and Pittsburgh, which will screen at CDS on Thursday, January 23, at 7 p.m. The National Endowment for the Humanities recognized Stephenson’s work and awarded him a fellowship to continue his research on Smith; currently, Stephenson is directing a documentary and oral history project about the New York loft where Smith lived and worked and where jazz greats, such as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Charles Mingus, frequently held all-night jam sessions. Stephenson will present this work, "The Jazz Loft Tapes: W. Eugene Smith’s Obsession with Music," on March 26 at 7 p.m.

Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Portrait
Graphic evidence of the prevailing paradoxes of American life, simultaneous growth and decay, beauty and squalor, generosity and greed, love and hatred, understanding and ignorance. With compassionate camera, he sought to reveal rather than indict. Using Pittsburgh as a mirror, he has caught reflections of America which will both comfort and disturb. – From Eugene Smith’s notes, ca. 1956

Smith believed Pittsburgh was an ideal subject for exposing the conflicts of 1950s America, and he aimed to create a photo essay that captured the complexity both of the city and of the modern world. Assembling these images into a coherent essay grew to represent for Smith the daunting task – perhaps the impossibility- – of creating a definitive expression of his subject as he saw it. Smith said that his Pittsburgh photographs were the most vital expression of his life’s work, and yet he judged the project to be an utter failure.

In the mid-1970s, while delivering what would amount to almost a self-eulogy – he would die only a few years later – Smith recalled the Pittsburgh period of his career: "I think that I was at my peak as a photographer in, say, 1958 or so. My imagination and my seeing were both, I don’t know ... ‘red hot’ or something. Everywhere I looked, every time I thought, it seemed to me it left me with great exuberance and just a truer quality of seeing. But it was the most miserable time of my life." Dream Street yields a provocative and illuminating perspective on Smith’s creative process and an invaluable portrait of Pittsburgh at the pinnacle of its industrial might.

All of the photographs in Dream Street were taken between 1955 and 1957, and many are iconic images of Pittsburgh. Smoky City, for example, shows newly built office buildings behind a screen of smoke from steel mills, and Dance of the Flaming Coke, catches a steelworker in motion as he handles smoldering material. Other images, such as barges on the Monongahela river, United States Steel’s Homestead Works, hillside houses and staircases, the old Home Plate Café, and the statue of Honus Wagner outside of Forbes Field, depict well-known sights to those who are familiar with Pittsburgh, as it was in the 1950s and as it is now.

Some of the Pittsburgh project photographs evoke a feeling of loneliness and despair, independent of time or place. An old woman sits alone on the steps of a closed store as young people sit and talk above her on the roof, each unaware of the others. A young African American boy hangs tightly to the top of a street pole, his body draped over the sign, "Pride Street." A teenage girl leans against a parking meter at a street carnival and transmits the feeling of melancholy that somehow seems out of place in the optimistic 1950s.

Smith felt the value of his Pittsburgh photographs was to be found in the expressive potential of the organized whole. Many magazines, including Life, were interested in the project, but Smith would not relinquish editorial control of the layout. In fact, he rejected several offers of up to $20,000 because publishers would not allow him control of the essay. Finally, Popular Photography magazine agreed to give Smith 38 pages in its 1959 Photography Annual, paying him only $1,900, but giving him complete control of the layout.

The Photography Annual spread was only a brief representation of Smith’s larger vision, and he considered the published layout, which he aptly titled "Labyrinthian Walk," to be a "debacle" and a "failure." Perhaps doomed from the start in finding a satisfactory place to publicly display the complex essay that he imagined, Smith left behind 1,200 master prints and approximately 6,000 work prints, along with snapshots and sketches of bulletin boards on which his ideas for arrangement of the photos were pinned. Dream Street is organized on Smith’s intentions for the layout, as documented through the sketches and snapshots of the bulletin boards on which he worked out his ideas. The exhibition also is informed by Smith’s own selections and arrangements of Pittsburgh prints that he produced for three retrospectives of his work between 1960 and 1971.

Eugene Smith
Throughout his career, Smith was famous for his powerful images and photo essays, and for his difficult personality. His photo essays gained iconic status, yet his obsessive demands for artistic control of his work, along with the demands he placed on himself, earned him the reputation of a maverick. It was a reputation Smith cherished.
Born in 1918, Smith began his career at the age of 14 as a stringer for newspapers in Wichita, Kansas, his hometown. A photograph of the drought-parched bed of the Arkansas River that he took while still in his teens appeared in The New York Times in 1934. His work earned him a photography scholarship to Notre Dame University, but Smith abandoned his scholarship after the first year to pursue a career in New York City. In the years before World War II, Smith’s fame grew, and his photographs were seen in the nation’s best-known magazines, including Newsweek, Life, Collier’s, and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as in The New York Times. By 1939, Smith was a full-time staff photographer at Life, but he resigned after two years, disappointed with his routine assignments.

World War II brought more exciting subject matter. For Ziff-Davis publishing company, Smith spent two years photographing 16 frontline combat missions in the Pacific theater. In 1944, he rejoined Life and captured the brutal struggles for Guam, Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Iwo Jima. Smith’s craft matured in the three years he spent on the front lines. His images portrayed a tragedy that transcended the drama and horrors of combat, but his career as a war correspondent ended on Okinawa in 1945 when he was struck in the head and left hand by fragments from a Japanese mortar round.

After recuperating for more than a year, Smith returned to Life magazine where he took on more than 50 assignments from 1947 to1954. His photo essays, such as "Spanish Village," depicting the drama of life pared to essentials, "Nurse-midwife," showing nobility amid shocking poverty, and "Country Doctor," about a Spartan life dedicated to healing, and numerous others, are considered major works in the history of photojournalism. Although he gained fame and commanded a high salary at Life, Smith constantly wrangled with editors for artistic control of his work. Arguments grew increasingly vitriolic, and in 1954, Smith quit and joined Magnum, the photographer’s cooperative, which sent him to Pittsburgh on the Lorant assignment.

Publication
An accompanying publication, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project, a 176-page book edited by Sam Stephenson and illustrated with 175 duotone photographs, is available for $39.95. Dream Street is a Lyndhurst Book, published by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with W.W. Norton & Company.

Support
This exhibition is organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, with the participation of the W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona, and made possible by the generous support of The Henry L. Hillman Foundation, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, Pamela Z. Bryan, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Inc., and the W. P. Snyder III Charitable Fund. The CDS exhibit is presented with additional support from the Lyndhurst Foundation.

ACCOMANYING EXHIBITION
Our Streets: Photographic Portraits of the Evolving Triangle

Our Streets was inspired by W. Eugene Smith’s photographic portrait of the city of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. The photographs in Our Streets were made in 2002 by students taking CDS continuing education courses based on Smith’s work and the work of other documentary photographers who have attempted to render the visual complexities of cities and towns.

The Triangle region of North Carolina in 2002 is a much different place from urban, industrial Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Yet the pictures in Our Streets indicate that many of the paradoxes that Smith obsessively sought to render in Pittsburgh are prevalent here today: ongoing tensions between growth and decay, old and new, past and present; conflicts between the natural and built environments; and an eerie beauty that can be found in the way light falls on even the most ordinary scenes. The contradictions found in a sprawling, suburban region like ours are perhaps quieter, more ambiguous, and more contemplative than those of 1950s Pittsburgh, but as we examine them closely we see that they are no less significant.

Our Streets includes work by photographers Bryan Andregg, Pollie Barden, Chris Black, Daniel Casey, Lorien Denny-Coates, Clifton Dowell, JoAnn Gravely, Dianitia Hutcheson, Amy Joseph, Carol Laurey, David Mason, Marya Mayer, Suzanne McKenzie, Catherine Moga, Brian J. Morton, Ruth Ware, Jaqueline Murphy-Miller, Milt Rhodes, Nanci Tanton, and Tim van der Weert.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Friday, January 17, 6-8 p.m.
Public Reception

Thursday, February 20, 7 p.m.
"The City as a Living Entity": Examining the Triangle through Smith’s Pittsburgh Project
A conversation with Tom Hanchett, Levine Museum of the New South; Rich Killingsworth, Active Living by Design; and Kate Dobbs Ariail, a founding board member of Liberty Arts Inc. and a former art critic for The Independent. Panelists will address Smith’s response to Pittsburgh at its industrial zenith in the mid-1950s, the transformations in American cities in the subsequent half-century, and the historical and continuing implications of those changes for Durham and the Triangle region.

Wednesday, March 5, 7 p.m.
A Conversation with Our Streets Photographers
The dynamics of regional growth involve a continual process of construction, destruction, and reconstruction of urban centers, suburbs, and rural communities. The Triangle is an interesting microcosm of city and community life in America – with its rapid population growth; ever-sprawling suburbs; the high-tech success of RTP; major colleges and universities; the disappearing agricultural communities of surrounding environs; a fading industrial heritage in downtown Durham; and controversial and halting efforts to reshape downtown Durham and Raleigh. Join the photographers of Our Streets for a conversation about their work, the process of documenting the place where they live, and the perspective offered by Smith’s work.

Tuesday, March 18, 7 p.m. (re-scheduled event)
Filmmaker Kenneth Love presents Brilliant Fever: W. Eugene Smith and Pittsburgh and One Shot: The Life and Work of Teenie Harris

Brilliant Fever: W. Eugene Smith and Pittsburgh (2001, 30 min)
Brilliant Fever is a cinematic interpretation of W. Eugene Smith’s epic Pittsburgh project, with rare footage of Smith at work in his darkroom and an original music score by Henry Shapiro. Incorporating the voice of Smith himself, this documentary is a sensitive and revealing view of the great photographer.

One Shot: The Life and Work of Teenie Harris (2001, 56 min)
Charles "Teenie" Harris loved taking pictures, and he did so with such ease he was given the nickname "One Shot." From 1931 to 1975, the Pittsburgh Courier photographer combed the streets of Pittsburgh, snapping shots of African American life – everything from sports to jazz to politics. Harris, who died in 1998 at age 89, left behind a valuable legacy – he kept all of his 80,000 negatives. Harris’s photographs show the camaraderie, the friendship, and the spirit of the Pittsburgh African American community.

Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love has worked as a filmmaker for 27 years. His work includes more than thirty award-winning National Geographic television specials, including Emmy Awards for Individual Achievement in Sound Recording on Serengetti Diary and Realm of the Alligator, and seven additional Emmy nominations. Love is also a professional photographer and is represented by National Geographic. He has photographed Bill Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and the King of Spain as well as artistic giants Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Isaac Stern, Eubie Blake, Itzhak Perlman, and Andre Previn and scientists Jane Goodall, Robert Ballard, and Louis Alvarez. Love’s natural history photography includes award-winning photographs of chimpanzees in Tanzania, alligators in the Okeefenokee Swamp, and koalas in Australia.

Love’s extensive community involvement includes creating and founding Pittsburgh Voyager, a river-based, hands-on educational experience for elementary and high school students. Voyager is currently the U.S. Navy’s largest outreach program in the country. Love grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He received an MFA in film and television from Carnegie Mellon University.

Wednesday, March 26, 7 p.m.
"The Jazz Loft Tapes: W. Eugene Smith’s Obsession with Music"
Dream Street exhibition curator and book author Sam Stephenson, a research associate at CDS, talks about Smith’s obsession with jazz and other music. In 1957, in the throes of his Pittsburgh saga, Smith moved into a loft building in Manhattan’s flower district that was a legendary haunt of such jazz musicians as Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, and Roland Kirk, along with countless underground figures. For seven years, Smith documented the scene – both inside the building and through the windows – with many thousands of photographs, and he wired the building like a studio and made nearly 1,000 hours of stereo audiotapes of the music sessions. In this program Stephenson gives this material a rare public presentation, and he discusses Smith’s common claim that music – the late quartets of Beethoven, the topsy-turvy rhythms of Thelonious Monk – influenced his ideas for his Pittsburgh photographs more than anything else.