University Times

In February 1851, a Massachusetts daguerreotypist named James Nelson moved to Pittsburgh and opened a photography studio in Lafayette Hall on Fourth Street.

Over the next several years, Nelson's business grew to become one of the largest photography studios west of the Allegheny Mountains. And then, in 1857, it disappeared from city directories. Nobody knows what happened to Nelson. But what he left behind was a portrait of a man and a women (who resembles actress Amy Irving), Pittsburgh's oldest documented photograph.

James Nelson's "Portrait of a Man and Woman Seated" is part of an exhibit of more than 400 images by over 100 photographers entitled "Pittsburgh Revealed: Photographs Since 1850" that opens Saturday, Nov. 8, at the Carnegie Museum of Art and continues through Jan. 25.

Nelson's photograph also occupies a prominent place in the accompanying book, "Pittsburgh Revealed: Photographs Since 1850." Published by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the book is being distributed by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Along with 111 photos from the exhibit, it contains essays by show curators Charlee Brodsky and Linda Benedict-Jones, and an introduction by Pitt Poetry Series poet Jan Beatty.

Photographers whose work appears in the show and the book include Life's Margaret Bourke-White; Lewis Hine, whose turn-of-the-century photos illustrated "The Pittsburgh Survey," one of the greatest works ever of social history, and Clyde Hare, who photographed Pittsburgh's Renaissance I in the late 1940s and published "Clyde Hare's Pittsburgh" two years ago.

Other notable photographers featured in the show are Alvin Langdon Coburn, renowned for his city scenes of New York, London and Paris, and portraits of prominent authors and artists like George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound and Auguste Rodin; Charles "Teenie" Harris, a Pittsburgh Courier photographer from 1936 to 1975, and Luke Swank, Pitt's official photographer in the 1930s and 1940s.

Images include an array of industrial sites such as U.S. Steel's Homestead Works and the Jones & Laughlin Mill that once occupied the land where Pitt's Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering now stands, neighborhoods, family portraits, moody and romantic riverscapes, public events, disasters and aerial views.

Some of the most powerful aerial shots were taken by Bourke-White. One is a 1955 view of a mill along the Monongahela River belching clouds of smoke that almost obscure the mill's surroundings. Two comparison shots of Downtown taken in the mid 1940s and mid 1950s show just how much Renaissance I did to cleaning up the city's air.

Dirt is one of the predominate elements in the photographs through the 1950s. The sight of thick scum on the Allegheny River, loose coal, timbers and rocks littering the banks of the Monongahela River, and smoke so dense the Gulf Building can barely be seen from the Pennsylvania Railroad Station three blocks away are startling today.

Looking at such images, it is easy to understand why Pittsburgh continues to have a difficult time shaking the image of a dirty city in the minds of some people around the country.

An exhibition highlight is Seth Voss Albee's "The Railroad Strike." On July 21, 1877, employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad, angered by a wage reduction and an increase in the size of trains traveling the dangerous stretch of mountainous track between Altoona and Pittsburgh, set fire to the roundhouse on 28th Street in the Strip District.

By the time the Philadelphia National Guard appeared on the scene and firefighters extinguished the blaze, a 20-block area had been destroyed along with millions of dollars of railroad property. Albee photographed smoldering wreckage, triumphant strikers and curious onlookers. His shots are among the first, possibly the first, of labor clashing with industry.

Albee issued "The Railroad Strike" as a set of 42 stereographs, two photographs of the same scene mounted side-by-side so that when viewed through a stereoscope or 3-D glasses, they appear to be 3-dimensional. The exhibit contains a section of stereographs that visitors can view with 3-D glasses.

Pittsburgh since 1970 is represented by the works of a dozen photographers who reveal the modern city in straight forward and as well as and colorful ways. Contemporary photographers in the show include Sue Abramson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Charlee Brodsky, Pam Bryan, Janice Erlich-Moss, Lee Friedlander, Lonnie Graham, Aaronel DeRoy Gruber, Duane Michals, Mark Perrott and Richard Stoner.

–Mike Sajna