Two pieces from the excellent Ralph (Early Summer 2002 edition.)

Dream Street
W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project

But he was the Compleat Photographer --- wanted to have total control of not only what he produced, but how it was reproduced. The editors at Life found him impossible to work with. Nine years after the end of the war, he took off on his own, and immediately landed a contract to work with historian Stefan Lorant producing a book commemorating Pittsburgh's bicentennial.

Smith began work in early 1955 --- and, according to him, never finished. He worked for three years, produced the required 400 shots for Lorant, but then went on to make another 17,000 photographs --- 600 as master-prints --- for his own project. It was to be called "Labyrinthian Walk," with essays and meditation on Pittsburgh. The photographs he accumulated --- of which some 175 are presented here --- are brilliant, sobering; an astonishing mix of shots of children playing, politicians debating, debutantes dancing, steelworkers surrounded by flame and dust and dirt, and most of all, the havoc that was the ecological nightmare called Pittsburgh: belching chimneys and darkness and grime and men and women prematurely aged in what they used to call The Glory of American Industrial Might.
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W. Eugene Smith Interview
Excerpt from W. Eugene Smith's interview with Philippe Halsman regarding the Pittsburgh project, 1957.

PH: How can this be financed? Is there any way, in American today, to pay a man back for his works?

WES: Time and pay? I don't know. It is not a new problem. How long did it take Joyce to do Ulysses? Finnegan's Wake? And what were his returns? I could never be rested within myself without doing this.

PH: But what of the photographer who does not have financial means?

WES: I don't. Sometimes it seems I financed it from the lining of my stomach. As for others --- if asked, I will advise them not to do it --- and I will hope they do.
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