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Photographer Elliott Erwitt captured the spirit of a postwar city in transition, writes Vaughn Wallace, who sorted through hundreds of negatives to curate a new book on the New York resident’s work
Photographer Elliott Erwitt captured the spirit of postwar Pittsburgh, a city in transition.
In September 1950, 22-yearold Elliott Erwitt stepped off a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh and, new to the city, took a small, rented room at the YMCA Downtown. The Parisborn Mr. Erwitt had traveled to Pittsburgh from New York at the invitation of Roy Stryker, the former head of the Information Division of the federal government’s Farm Security Administration.
Controlling, magnanimous, often impossibly mission-driven, Mr. Stryker had furthered the careers of countless photojournalists, many of whom — Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks and more — in later years would be recognized as pioneers whose visual stories helped define the first half of the 20th century.
At the time Mr. Erwitt arrived in Pittsburgh, Mr. Stryker was tasked with a commission by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a project that aimed to document the City of Bridges at mid-century. The ACCD envisioned a far different postwar Pittsburgh than the bleak mill towns of popular imagination. In place of a Pittsburgh defined by steel manufacturing and smog that dimmed the midday sun, the conference saw a remade city of glass and gloss, and even greenery: a cultural and academic center in its own right, made modern by far more than the heavy industry that gifted Pittsburgh its legacy.
Planners hoped to endow the Downtown core with a postindustrial sophistication — but they also knew that bringing dreams of this sort to fruition came with a heavy public cost. They recognized the need for a stirring, methodical photographic documentation of the transition from the old Pittsburgh to the new.
That task, at once colossal and intricate, fell to Mr. Stryker, who called in photographers from around the nation to join the newly formed Pittsburgh Photographic Library, headquartered near the top of the 42-story Gothic Revival Cathedral of Learning on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus. Mr. Erwitt joined a rank of colleagues that included James P. Blair, Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Arnold Eagle, Regina Fisher, Clyde Hare, Russell Lee, Sol Libsohn, Fran Nestler and Richard Saunders, all tasked with creating a collective portrait of the city’s rebirth. By the project’s end, some 18,000 negatives filled the PPL’s files.
Mr. Stryker reviewed Mr. Erwitt’s work with a characteristically discerning gaze, carefully sorting the images and selecting those that, to his mind, were useful in advancing the message that the conference had hired him to articulate in pictures.
Negatives that failed to meet the rubric set forth in Mr. Stryker’s script or his mind were “killed.” In past projects, unsanctioned or unapproved photos under Mr. Stryker’s hand had not just been cast aside; they were physically (and disappointingly) hole-punched, rendering them forever unusable.
But in Pittsburgh, Mr. Stryker filed unharmed negatives away in boxes marked “K” — the kill file — making the Pittsburgh project one of the very few in Mr. Stryker’s long career for which researchers can view the entirety of the collection. In this case, that entirety amounts to a trove of roughly 18,000 negatives from various photographers who worked on the conference project. Many of Mr. Erwitt’s negatives were among those that were slated to be “killed” but survived — negatives that, long forgotten and long unseen, now emerge in the book “Pittsburgh 1950” from the murk of the intervening decades. It’s in this kill file that we find some of Mr. Erwitt’s most compelling frames.
The book’s pictures, representing one of Mr. Erwitt’s first real shooting assignments, span just four short months — an ellipsis in Mr. Erwitt’s long life and career. Mr. Erwitt, who is now 89, departed Pittsburgh in December 1950 for a stint in the Army; he built his career as a photographer to legendary status in the following 67 years.
Mr. Stryker’s PPL continued its mission until 1953. As funding dried up, Mr. Stryker left to direct a project for the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., and the group eventually disbanded. The photographs eventually made their way to the Pennsylvania Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where they have resided, largely undisturbed and available to the public, since the late 1950s.