My Hometown

We went to Pittsburgh to celebrate Christmas with my family. I grew up in Pittsburgh, left there to go to college in Boston. Came back for a couple of years after that, then went to North Carolina for grad school and never lived there again. Although I loved growing up in Pittsburgh, when I left for the second time, I couldn't wait to be somewhere else. Now, even though I live in one of the most vibrant and stimulating cities there is, I miss my hometown and scheme ways to move back there again.

The day after Christmas, we went to the History Museum in the Strip District. In the gift shop, I saw a copy of W. Eugene Smith's book, Dream Street - the same one I have on my shelf at home.

Smith was a legendary photojournalist producing his greatest work during World War II in the Pacific and in his photo essays for Life Magazine following the war. By all accounts he was considered difficult to work with because of he refused direction or oversight. He was an uncompromising perfectionist who wanted to follow his own vision. In 1955, after resigning from Life Magazine, Smith was hired to shoot a photo essay on Pittsburgh for a book on the city's bicentennial. He was only commissioned for about hundred photographs with the whole job expected to take about 3 weeks. He left Pittsburgh a year later after shooting some seventeen thousand photographs. He wanted to compile the whole into a multi-layered essay of the city, its "vistas of melancholy" and "equilibriums of paradox." Smith said of Pittsburgh that "in all travels, all experiences, I have seldom felt the contradictions."

"The long squat belching of its industries, the blemish of its slums, and how at times both have given way to the cleanliness of cared for greenery in newly built parks close by newly constructed buildings. From the blighted to even how soft with sensual beauty the city can be - seen from high, looking along the buildings and up the river to the moon which has just become fully stated above the horizon." W. Eugene Smith, from Smith's 1956 application for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation to finish his Pittsburgh Project.

Smith's biographer has said he was looking for truth in a photograph. And he found truth in the faces, vistas, and paradoxes of Pittsburgh. (I wonder if the city has ever mounted an exhibition of Smith's Pittsburgh Project. Perhaps they should for its 250th celebration in 2008.)

I find truth there too. The easy leap is that it lives in the foundations of who I am. I find truth in the hills and the s-curves, the houses perched on those hills and the thick deciduous trees hugging those curves. In the telephone wires overhead. In the rivers that once shipped this country's ore and the steel that hefted its cities. In the people I know and the people I might claim to know just because they're, too, from Pittsburgh.

It's never been a glamorous city. Never a city that struck an inquirer as a place worth being from. Sometimes, though, you might find someone who had visited, and a look of delight would cross their face, "Pittsburgh! what beautiful architecture. I love how you come out of that tunnel and the city just appears in front of you..."

But I love the city's grayness, its cloud-heavy ceiling just clearing the tops of bridges. Its muted colors (because the clouds make everything flat. A photographer would love such a huge soft box in the sky - unlike the high contrast of sunny places.). The colors of Pittsburgh, to me, are greens, browns, and oranges, and deep reds, a bit of yellow. And - of course - black and gold.

I love Pittsburgh's history. The work ethic of immigrants pulling double shifts in steel mills to send their kids to school in places they could never be able to call their own. I know the place, from its workers to its owners, and they're not so far apart.

I guess most of all, now that I no longer live there, the only way I can express my full-throated appreciation of my birthplace is on Steeler Sunday. And I do. And when I do, I'm cheering on the streets of Northside, especially Highridge, Nativity Grade School, Sewickley Academy, grade school and high school football and basketball on the weekends, the Pennsylvania Building on Grant Street, Confluence Technologies, Mellon Office Towers 1, 2 and 3, the William Penn Hotel, McKnight Road, Shadyside and every minute I ever spent in Pittsburgh, wishing I was somewhere else. The tide has turned.

It's a place that claims you, whether you know or not. Whether you like or not. I just happen to really like it.

A few shots from my copy of 'Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project'

christmas on wall street

tree on wall street, in front of the new york stock exchange


I love christmas in new york. The energy and lights and the feeling that something magical could happen.

the art of losing

i read this poem today, courtesy of a lovely post on gawker (weird to put those words in the same sentence). it immediately captivated me as every photo i've taken in recent years has to do with loss. it can be so staggering to lose something or - mostly - someone important to us, that we'll do anything to convince ourselves it doesn't matter. (or maybe that's just some of "us".)


One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.



Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.



Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.



I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.



I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.



--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.