What was the real world like in the 1950s?
As a very small person, born May 29, 1955, I relied on television for answers. And now, much evidence confirms the impressions I formed back then. Old movies, old sitcoms, old photographs all show a life that was different from ours, when choices were simpler and rules easier to follow. Reality was mostly black and white, cars were round, ladies wore dresses with impossible shapes, men rarely smiled.
Laughter on TV came without explanation. There was an answer for every problem. But that picture barely convinced a child, and certainly doesn’t persuade me today. To be fair, the people responsible for so many of these images never expected to be our sole source of information. They gave us news and celebrities and special events.
Everyday life was not their beat.
Now a different vision of the 1950s has emerged from an exhibition and a companion book of photographs: “Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project.” (Norton, 2002). The exhibition, which recently closed in New York, reopened Saturday at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, a vast repository that not only has Smith’s photographic archives but the archives of such other photographic giants as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Dan Weiner.
In the summer of 1955, Gene Smith was already a legendary Life magazine journalist, known for his heroic view of everyday life. He had published stories no other photographers could imagine, most notably his documents of Maude Callen, a black midwife caring for families in the back country of South Carolina.
In 1955, he took a free lance assignment, to make a few dozen pictures for a book about Pittsburgh, then the nation’s emblem of postwar prosperity.
Smith found rich material on every corner. When a small black boy shinnied to the top of a street sign at the intersection of Colwell and Pride Streets, Smith turned a lucky shot into a metaphor. The letters are bright and hard and white, while the boy’s thin frame in soft folds of denim echoes the beautiful drapery more often seen in classical art.
On long summer nights, he worked while the sun set, and used the glare of street lights to reveal human constellations of almost aching sadness. These images are about the life that never gets into headlines. When a young teenage girl waits alone by a gleaming black car, she embodies innocence . . . and loss. When men of all ages from 16 to 60 stand in silhouette along the lit-up counter of a takeout stand, you see a story of age, and ambition denied, a side of the ’50s that rarely shows up on the nostalgia channels.
Smith once called this large body of work a vision of “civic pride and civic shame . . . the infinite mixtures and the rewards and stresses of being of this place at this time . . . growth and the decay which is simultaneous with growth in every living thing. . . .”
It was a vision no one could ever capture. But Smith never lost faith in the power of the camera to represent his vision of truth. To our eyes, so accustomed to irony, this vision can becoming cloyingly sentimental. Today, it is clear that the pictures are really the reflection of his dreams. But Smith never could admit that his presence was part of the picture; instead, he tried to drown out the evidence with more emotion.
In the end, the project overwhelmed him. For Smith, Pittsburgh became an obsession. He made 13,000 exposures, winnowed them down to 2,000, printed and reprinted the images, arranged and rearranged them on giant panels. His talent gradually gave way to alcohol and benzedrine, but he didn’t stop working.
Toward the end of his life, in his last major story, Smith memorably used his camera in 1972 to expose the crippling effects of pollution in the water around Minimata, Japan, by showing a mother tenderly bathing her birth-defective child, Tomoko.
Historian Sam Stephenson, of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, has now assembled hundreds of photographs from Smith’s archives at the University of Arizona, and from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, to show that the photographer nearly achieved his goal. Stephenson acted as guest curator at the request of the exhibit’s organizer, Linda Batis, associate curator of fine arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
For all its sentiment, Smith’s record remains my best guide to everyday life on the day I was born. Through his pictures we can see quite clearly what was really different about the past — not the fashions, or the cars, or the fun they had, but the widespread conviction that the world was something large and knowable, that life was good, and that its citizens all had the power to make it better.
Gene Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs show how much we still resemble those citizens in the summer of 1955. And in his majestic inability to admit defeat we can see how dangerous that confidence could be to a man who saw its limits, and refused to give in.
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“Dream Street” will be in Tucson until Sept. 29; from January through March of 2003 it will be at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Durham, N.C. The book “Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project,” edited by Sam Stephenson with an essay by Alan Trachtenberg, is a Lyndhurst Book published by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with W. W. Norton & Co. $39.95.
