Malleable Portraits of a City: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Photos from Varied Perspectives

Abstract

This thesis concerns itself with the use of photographs to construct narratives regarding cities and urban change through an examination of W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs. In Chapter I, I examine Smith’s photographs in the context of Stefan Lorant’s illustrated history book, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. This chapter looks at the photos through the lens of portraiture, arguing that Lorant uses images to contribute to an overly simplified progress narrative of Pittsburgh’s postwar urban renewal. Chapter II looks at Smith’s own photo-essay of his Pittsburgh work, entitled “Labyrinthian Walk,” suggesting that the piece pushes back on the progress narrative of Lorant and attempts to characterize the city in a more nuanced way, particularly through the formal effect and structure of contrast. Here too, the images operate in a less rigid documentary manner. Chapter III considers the omissions from these two presentations of Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs, which are made visible by the archival record. I then delve into a discussion of my own curation of Smith’s omitted Pittsburgh photographs, seeking to produce a more abstract, non-narrative sequence which draws from a sense of collective memory and personal experience. Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of the malleability of these photographs and how they are made to fit differing perspectives on the meaning of this transformational period in Pittsburgh’s history.