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by W. Eugene Smith (Photographer), Sam Stephenson (Editor), Ross Gay (Foreword by)
New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh project.
In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant's book commemorating the city's bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs. In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the "synthesis of the whole," presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.Author Biography
W. Eugene Smith (1918-78) was an American photographer who worked for Life from 1939 to 1954 and thereafter was affiliated with the Magnum photo agency. Several posthumous overviews of Smith's work have been published, including The Big Book, a retrospective of his work as he designed it, and a biography, Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith, His Life and Photographs, by Ben Maddow. Sam Stephenson is a writer from North Carolina now based in College Station, TX. He is the author of a biography of Smith, Gene Smith's Sink, as well as Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue. He is also the ghostwriter of Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, a forthcoming memoir by Lucinda Williams. In 2019, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in progress about the band Jane's Addiction.
