Search results for ""Author W. Eugene Smith""

Book SynopsisTrade Review“[Dream Street] is Smith’s attempt to record the paradoxes of city life in America—the clutch of industry, the dogged persistence of both community and loneliness, the forces of love, hate, growth and decay. Not even the venerated master of photojournalists could quite pull this off, but Smith’s obsessiveness was harnessed to an enormous talent, and he wasn’t far from the mark when he wrote that [this work] would ‘create history.’" -- Vicki Goldberg * The New York Times, on the original edition *“Inspired by Joyce and Faulkner, Smith envisioned a symphonic, multilayered photo essay portraying the entire city; his failure to complete it haunted him for the rest of his life. Here are more than a hundred and fifty of his nourish and oddly poignant images: gleaming railyards at night; buildings wrapped in clouds of industrial smoke; the face of a steelworker, the Bessemer fires reflected in his safety goggles.” * New Yorker, on the original edition *“These images are about the life that never gets into headlines. When a young teenage girl waits alone by a gleaming black car, she embodies innocence . . . and loss. When men of all ages from sixteen to sixty stand in silhouette along the lit-up counter of a takeout stand, you see a story of age, and ambition denied, a side of the 1950’s that rarely shows up on nostalgia channels. . . . Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs show how much we still resemble those citizens in the summer of 1955. And in his majestic inability to admit defeat we can see how dangerous that confidence could be to a man who saw its limits, and refused to give in.” -- Mary Panzer * Chicago Tribune, on the original edition *“Smith imagined a visual collage to rival Finnegan’s Wake in scope and intensity. His astonishing ambition was . . . his Faustian pact with the city . . . . There are no touching displays of picturesque individuality, just a city aesthetically dissected; an effort to ‘get to the guts of the matter and show the bastards as they are.’” * TIME OUT London, on the original edition *“Smith’s presence haunts this book, even a quarter century after his death.” * Washington City Paper, on the original edition *“Every picture tells a story—but put them all together and you might get Finnegans Wake. In the grand canyons of Pittsburgh, monolithic steel mills overshadow humble spires; hillsides scored with 500-step staircases plunge down to inky pitmouths. By day, the steelworkers hover like ghosts, silhouetted in the furnace flames. By night, the moon shines down Stygian rivers, as the shining railroad snakes away into blackest suburbs. More Dante than Joyce, this is a magnificent vision of light and dark.” * Evening Standard, on the original edition *“Dream Street is a diffuse portrait of a community that still led the world in steel production while grappling with the challenge of making the air breathable. It’s also a time machine that takes those who weren’t alive or around during those years to the moment the soul of modern Pittsburgh was forged. Much like its creator, [Dream Street] is without sentiment. It is clear-eyed, despite the smoke of the coke works, and devoid of pretense. It is full of revelation and surprises. It inspires in a way that only great art—and great themes—are capable of inspiring.” * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, on the original edition *“These dark-toned photographs are dense with meaning. And in [Dream Street] they are given the space to do it. Smith’s best pictures are complete, complicated worlds. The bigness, in every sense, of Smith’s pictures was also the bigness of Pittsburgh.” -- Sarah Boxer * The New York Times, on the original edition *“The range of this project lies not only in its subjects and themes, but also its pictorial and compositional variety, and its strategies and ploys. In other words, Smith used every device and trick he knew, and he knew a lot. The Pittsburgh project found Smith at the height of his abilities, which he brought to bear with vast ambition. Aiming to capture such a cross-section of society, neighborhoods, cityscapes, moods, and feelings, it remains unrivaled in this breadth and depth of its scope. Fifty years later, it jumps out at us, and the nostalgia suffusing [the book] is not just for the past depicted and our assumptions about it . . . but also for a time when a photographer could be so engaged with the real world, and yet so introspective about Americanness, and so secure in the belief that images would elevate the viewer. What Smith accomplished here is shaped not only by his personal ambition, but also by photographers’ ambitions for photography, and Americans’ ambitions for America.” * Photo Review, on the original edition *“This epic portrait of Pittsburgh has become legendary in the history of photography. . . . Viewed together in this compelling, commanding publication, Smith’s photographs present energetic images of hope and despair, rebuilding and decay, poverty and affluence, and solitude and togetherness. . . . These images of mid-century, post-war Pittsburgh powerfully resonate with America today.” * B&W: Black & White Magazine for Collectors of Fine Photography, on the original edition *“Dream Street stands as a final reminder of the power of Smith’s poetic vision.” * The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the original edition *“The Pittsburgh photographs were Smith’s after-LIFE magnum opus, and with them he produced a darkly urban vision, less out of a magazine than out of film noir . . . the paradoxes of a city churning toward progress and leaving vast segments of its population in squalor [are] metaphors for Smith’s state of mind. . . . What Smith was after was not a series of punchy vignettes but a sprawling epic in the manner of his favorite music: Beethoven’s late string quartets and the rhapsodic improvisations of John Coltrane.” * Los Angeles Times, on the original edition *“Dream Street allows us to assess Smith’s greatest achievement; an extensive, complex, and utterly engaging photo-essay, each element of which has genuine bite. From the skyline to the assembly line, steel workers to city council members, and men on the picket line to children at play, Smith captures the ambitions and inequities of an American city at mid-century with extraordinary deftness and wit.” -- Vincent Aletti * The Village Voice, on the original edition *"For Smith, Dream Street was an artistic obsession. For Stephenson it appears to have been a labor of love. Perhaps much the same thing. Every reader will have his or her own favorite images in Dream Street." -- Michael Patrick Pearson * NYJB *Table of ContentsForeword by Ross Gay “W. Eugene Smith and Pittsburgh” by Sam Stephenson Photographs “‘Man-Breaking City’: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh” by Alan Trachtenberg W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Layout for Photography Annual1959 Notes to Photographs Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“[Smith’s] photos of the city offer a rare glimpse into a neighborhood being itself when it thought no one was watching. This will be an essential book for jazz fans, photography lovers and those interested in the history of New York.” * Publishers Weekly, on the original edition *“The samples from the tapes that Stephenson had transcribed work with the photos to bring a moment in jazz to life as perhaps no work in any other medium, including documentary cinema, ever has. Absolutely magnificent.” -- Ray Olson * Booklist, on the original edition *“Every obsessive deserves his own obsessive Boswell, and W. Eugene Smith has his in Stephenson.” -- Fred Kaplan * New York Magazine, on the original edition *“The most chaotic and soulful gift book this year… an elegiac stew of sight and sound, and a singularly weird, vital and thrumming American document.” -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times, on the original edition *“A stunning cross of scholarly history and Smith's haunted photography.” -- Jesse Jarnow * The Village Voice, on the original edition *“[The Jazz Loft Project] is a riveting work of social archaeology, and extraordinary testament to artists whose music caught all the tumult and excitement of a fast-changing America. It is also a glimpse inside the frenetic mind of a photographic pioneer; an obsessive, maverick genius, who died, poor and relatively unsung, in 1978, leaving behind some twenty-two tons of archive material, including his unfinished and ultimately unfinishable jazz project.” -- Sean O'Hagan * The Guardian, on the original edition *“A book whose pages convey, beautifully, the strange cultural moment when a rat-infested hulk of a building hosted a perfect storm of creativity.” -- Mike Hobart * Financial Times, on the original edition *“Smith was galvanized by the musicians’ passion. . . . He seems to have likewise inspired by their sound; the photographs frequently suggest a kind of rhythm. . . . The photographs are also patently theatrical.” -- Nicole Rudick * Aperture, on the original edition *“[Smith’s photos] are less focused on expressive acts than on a general scene—where a glass of beer on a piano is more important than the music going on fuzzily behind it, or the whole exhausting flow of an all-night session is summarized in a pair of shoes hovering over a dozen cigarette butts on the floor. . . . The loft photos are part of a larger attempt to capture the asymmetrical constellations that form and unform all around us, all the time: inside and outside the building are equally fascinating to Smith.” -- Jonathan Elmer * American Literary History, on the original edition *“Smith was a driven, supremely talented man who wanted his photography to change the world—and it did. . . . After Smith’s 1979 death, some 4,000 hours of tape reposed, with his splendid photos, at the University of Arizona. What was on them was unsubstantiated legend. Enter Sam Stephenson, who tended their digitization and over painstaking years collated them with oral histories and other documentation. The result captures American culture in creative flux from the ground-eye level.” -- Gene Santoro * American History, on the original edition *“The Jazz Loft Project’s unique source material gives readers a perspective on musicians involved in the bebop that could not be gleaned from their depiction in magazines or even the music they created.” -- Chris Teal * ARSC Journal, on the original edition *“Smith left a magnificent mess, and Stephenson, in his second decade of research on the man, maintains the same simultaneous eye both for detail and the bigger picture.” -- Patrick Hinely * Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) News, on the original edition *“Intriguing and memorable.” -- Ron Wynn * BookPage, on the original edition *“An extraordinary book.” -- Peter Margasak * Chicago Reader, on the original edition *“The highlight of the book is the photographs of musicians in the passions of playing. In one photo, [Thelonious] Monk is leaning back—cigarette dangling from his mouth—just as he lifts his right hand off the keyboard. He is drenched in shadow, but the light catches his face creating the stark contrast that distinguishes Smith's work.” -- Elizabeth Hoover * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, on the original edition *“Working with photographs and audiotapes made by photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, Stephenson relates the history of an active jazz musicians’ loft in New York City in a pivotal era.” -- Virginia Schaefer * Internet Review of Books, on the original edition *"There are many terrific photos in The Jazz Loft Project of musicians playing, chatting, or resting among Smith’s archive. But these photos read quite differently from famous photos by such photographers as Carol Reiff, William Gottlieb, or William Claxton. They are stranger productions altogether—often fragmented, framing hands or feet alone, or featuring unplayed instruments with no musicians in sight. . . . Stephenson has undertaken a massive task, involving extensive archival and field research, as well as innumerable editorial decisions, and he has produced a stunning book that winds its argument less along the wire of discourse than across a complex web of images in juxtaposition. Unlike his gargantuan Pittsburgh project, this book is not something Smith imagined, or had in view. But Stephenson has done something Smith found very hard to do, and has done it, moreover, in a way that is true to Smith’s extraordinary vision of the world." -- Jonathan Elmer * American Literary History *

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