Children at Colwell and Pride Streets, Hill District

<p>In 1955 W. Eugene Smith, one of America’s preeminent photojournalists, had just resigned from Life magazine and joined the photographers’ collective Magnum. He accepted a commission to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh to produce 100 photographs for a book celebrating the city’s bicentennial. Instead, he ended up staying for a year, making subsequent visits, and ultimately shooting some 17,000 photographs in what became the most ambitious photo-essay of his career. “To portray a city is beyond ending,” he wrote. “To begin such an effort is in itself a grave conceit.” With street names like “Dream” and “Pride” (seen here), the Rust Belt city—striving, hopeful, disillusioned—became a visual metaphor for the contra-dictions of 1950s America.</p>