Book Review, W Eugene Smith, Dream Street

I have been intending to post a review of Dream Street, aka The Pittsburgh Project, since my earlier review on The Last Steam Railroad in America by O Winston Link and finally here it is.

Firstly some good news, the book is easy to get hold of and not too expensive, here's a link for Amazon as a starter:

W Eugene Smith

Wikipedia describes William Eugene Smith as an

American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs

B 1918, d 1978. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939. He soon resigned from Life too, Smith severed his ties with Life over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of Albert Schweitzer. Upon leaving Life he joined the Magnum photo agency in 1955. There he started his project to document Pittsburgh when sent on a 3 week assignment...
Read more about W Eugene Smith.

The Pittsburgh Project

This assignment from Magnum was initially supposed to take Smith three weeks and was to produce 100 photographs. In a project that ended up spanning years Smith actually shot some 17 thousand photographs, the full collection was too large to ever be shown.

Dream Street

Eventually Smith selected 88 images in the form of a book-length photo essay for Popular Photography's Photography Annual 1959 when editor Bruce Downs gave Smith total control over the layout. This set are reproduced in Dream Street.

Of the opening picture of the steelworker with flames reflected in his goggles (and note its flipped around from the version above), Smith said "I needed a picture of man submerged underneath industry, but not lost.":

Conclusions

This is a book that leaves an impact. It is hard not to be truly impressed with the depth and scale of Smith's work and in a review such as this it is hard to convey much more than a taster of the work. I am not entirely sure what might be a fair comparison, for example I personally find Dream Street much more engaging than Robert Frank's The Americans, though recognising that the two were captured in different ways and with different timescales. It is perhaps the industrial themes that resonate with me and inspire my more humble attempts to photograph my home town (which includes its own small iron works). Dream Street is amongst my favourite monographs and for those that have not read this book I recommend getting hold of a copy.