Product Description

In 1955, having ended his high-profile career with "Life" magazine, W. Eugene Smith spent a year in Pittsburgh compiling nearly 16,000 photographs. Only a fragment of the work was ever seen, despite Smith's conviction that it was his greatest set of photographs. Now, in an assemblage of pictures that Smith asserted were the "synthesis of the whole", we see a portrayal not just of Pittsburgh but also of mid-20th-century America by a master photojournalist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297459 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-30
• Released on: 2003-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
Sam Stephenson is a writer and research consultant at the Center for Documentary Studies. Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Grey Professor of American Studies and English Literature at Yale University.

Customer Reviews

A special piece of history
Dream Street will not win you over with its elegant aesthetics or even with "decisive moments," as might the work of other famous photographers. This is more like the kind of photography that Robert Penn Warren or Edgar Lee Masters might have created if they took pictures. Smith is a humanist whose pictures reveal the fabric of the lives of everyday people. My favorite pictures include the grimacing zoning commissioners and the hopeful faces of young veterans. Smith complements his photographs of people with compelling landscapes that show how people and machines interacted in this unique industrial ecosystem.
The pictures come with a text that explains the unusual story behind the creation of this essay. Like a few other geniuses, Smith was not adept at meeting the demands of his mortal peers. The original impetus for this work came from Life Magazine, who asked for a short term assignment about the region. Smith missed his deadline and ended up staying on to make pictures for several years! A set of galley layouts reveal the way that Smith conceptualized the important parts of his work, from sections such as "money and commerce" to "alone in the city." The text explains how his vision was compromised by the format of magazines. Even when more than 80 images were finally published with Smith's edit in Popular Photography, the photographer still viewed the result as a failure. The reader of this book will see that Smith was wrong about his efforts. Instead, this pictures make a great historical document about the life of a city.

Astounding
Simply astounding. As a former Pittsburgher I was familiar with the locations of Smith's photos and with much of the genre of Pittsburgh related documentary photography. (Smith was doing this work in PGH when my father was an undergrad at Pitt, so it is also nice to get another look at that era).

But, you should not own this book for sentimental reasons. You should own it because it is simply some astonishingly vivid B&W photography. (See also Robert Frank's The Americans. These folks were utterly in charge of their craft and working all on their own.) An amazing rush to look at, Smith's photos make you to get out your camera bag and get to work. It totally reenergized my own B&W work.

Wonderful, especially if you can't see the gallery
The Pittsburgh project gallery (shown in Pgh and other cities this year) is a fantastic display of nearly 200 prints that comprise one of the most important works of a great photographer. While reproductions hardly do justice to most fine prints, I recommend this book as a companion to the show, as well as a way to view the work if you are not able to see the gallery at one of the few cities in which it appears. I grew up in Pittsburgh, though long after these shots were taken. It is a spectacular look at mid-century Pittsburgh, and mid-century America.