Spring Travel: Pittsburgh forges ahead

Long before I ever went to Pittsburgh, my image of the place was formed by films: George Romero’s horror movies; “The Deer Hunter”; “Flashdance”; it felt dark and magnetic, another world entirely. Growing up, I’d wanted to be Jennifer Beals biking the streets in her Army jacket and welding goggles, in a city that to me radiated a kind of cool, as the soundtrack put it: “a world made of steel, made of stone.”

Years later, I’d encounter Pittsburgh through the eyes of influential Life magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith: projected like a film noir, the crisscrossing rivers and train tracks, smoke billowing from its furnaces as iron melted into billets of steel, workers carrying lunch pails up and down the hundreds of staircases that ran along the city’s precipitous slopes, connecting houses sandwiched into the hills, all which gave the place the look of an industrial fairy-tale town. But more than 50 years had passed since Gene Smith photographed the city, some decades since the collapse of the steel industry. When I went at last, the impression of Smith’s pictures resonated with me; they were a narrative of the place, one he never finished, but it was the story of a place, I felt, that could not have disappeared entirely, and it was that Pittsburgh I went looking for.

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The Washington Post Magazine: March 27, 2011

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There are lovely and funny and forlorn moments in Smith’s photographs , but the steelworker pictures are mesmerizing, dramatically orchestrated stuff: the dancelike movements of the welder in the burning pit of the mill, and a close-up of a mustachioed steelworker, his face so graphically rendered that he is, as Smith intended, not really an individual but an icon. The focus is centered on the goggles, in which the flames of the furnaces are reflected so hotly that his eyes appear to be on fire.

“I believe it’s a self-portrait,” says Sam Stephenson, who has written and edited two books of Smith’s work, “The Jazz Loft Project” and “Dream Street,” the latter of which includes 175 photographs of Smith’s Pittsburgh work. “That man is Smith, with passionate, burning eyes — a man who is inflamed, possessed and driven by what he sees, in a quixotic and uncontrollable manner.”

When Smith arrived in Pittsburgh in 1955, he was 37 and notoriously brilliant, difficult, obsessive and excessive — and a master of, and some say the inventor of, the photo essay. He was also addicted to amphetamines and alcohol, which, along with the thousands of jazz records he played at outrageous volumes, got him through marathon darkroom sessions. Frustrated by issues of creative control, he had quit Life and accepted an assignment from editor Stefan Lorant to shoot 100 pictures for a book commemorating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial and its renaissance, a portrait of a thriving city of industry and commerce and philanthropy and art and civic pride. The assignment was expected to take three weeks; Smith remained in Pittsburgh, producing about 20,000 negatives over four years.

“It was a great moment for Pittsburgh; the city’s population peaked in the 1950s,” Stephenson told me. “And Smith was in this transition moment; this was the time when he ceased to be a journalist and was in the process of becoming an artist. So you have Gene Smith at the peak of his powers, at the peak of his ambition, going to capture a city at its peak moment.”