[Leica] Eugene Smith in Pittsburgh

["Bill Harting" <wharting@adelphia.net>]

Just returned home after a long road trip that started with a Tuesday in
Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum of Art Eugene Smith exhibit; it is well
worth the trip and the time.

Smith was the door through which I entered photography. When I started
playing with my first "real" camera (a Miranda slr) my mentor at the time
dropped a Smith monograph in my lap and said something like "here's what a
real photographer can do." And my head turned around.

I can in no way here provide a review, but I offer some of my impressions,
noted at the time.

Smith used what I think of as simple films (Plus X and Tri X were frequently
seen in contact sheets), simple cameras (some kind of 4x5 is visible in a
silhouette against molten steel, and Leicas in one or more pictures taken of
him). He dared to take impossible pictures, under impossible light
conditions, and to achieve his vision in the darkroom.

My reaction to seeing what I believe are all his actual prints, neatly
framed, arrayed in groupings suggested by notes he had made during the
evolution of the Pittsburgh project, was for me a startling contrast to
seeing the pictures as actually published: to my thinking the framed
original prints, most within an 11x14 format, seemed clinical, almost
scientific, compared to the dynamics of the magazine pages he supervised or
visualized, where the play of double-page iconic pictures against
thumbnail-size counterpoints, created with their visual tattoo a momentum
that was completely missing when each picture was presented in a display in
which all images were equal.

And yet both presentations worked: I surely wanted to examine the prints up
close, to marvel in the depths and harmonics they displayed. But his work
would be missing a point without the conclusion, the realization, that
publishing on page after page offered: it is an era and medium that will not
come again.

In the background, music was playing, Bill Evans, Monk, evoking the time
Smith spent in the Sixth avenue loft.

Also interesting was his work method, not unique perhaps, but intense:
4x8-foot panels full of 5x7-inch work prints in constant flux as he built
and refined, and agonized over, his ideas. There were also examples of the
way prints were shaped, the work print almost snapshot-like in quality, and
work prints daring to be darker and darker.

Go see it if you can.

Bill Harting












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