A framed monochrome photo faces the entry door of our place in Boulder. It's small enough that some visitors never notice it. It's called "Dream Street", and was taken by W. Eugene Smith in 1955. The placement of the elements seems dreamlike, and the absence of "St." after "Dream" makes the latter word seem more like a suggestive verb than a noun, especially with its central placement in the composition, parallel to the picture plane. Even the car, leaning into the trees, seems to be dozing off. What little we see of the road vanishes into foliage, so we have to guess where we might be. At first sight, it was easy to guess that Smith was exploring someplace in rural America, or in suburbia, then in the midst of its rapid postwar expansion. Something about that sign and the cheerful '50 Studebaker* convertible suggests the optimism and prosperity that were part of the Fifties...
...and which are reflected in this Studebaker ad from 1951. But the "Dream Street" photo was part of a wider project, one of Smith's first as a member of the Magnum Photo cooperative. When Stefan Lorant hired Gene Smith to produce 100 photos celebrating Pittsburgh in its 200th year, he'd expected the project might possibly take 3 weeks. In the end, Smith spent about two years exploring and taking photographs, producing over 12,000 negatives. It turns out that "Dream Street", like the photo below, was taken in one of the neighborhoods housing the many African Americans who had fled conditions in the South to work in what was then an industrial powerhouse. The photographer's combination of curiosity, obsessive perfectionism, and fearlessness (he'd been wounded in the head and hand photographing combat in World War II) led him to get close enough to show the power of a steel mill's blast furnace, and to spend time with the inhabitants of the town's forgotten corners as well as its exclusive clubs. In an attempt to show the true character of a big city, Smith went from Dream Street to Pride Street...
Gene Smith documented a different America than the one we have now. When Smith took his last Pittsburgh photos in 1955, the Voting Rights Act was ten years in the future. But labor union membership peaked at about a third of the workforce in the Fifties, and overall income inequality was near its lowest level ever. In 1955, average CEO pay was about 20 times that of the average worker; by 2022 the Economic Policy Institute found that the average CEO made 344 times that of the average worker. The 1950 Studebaker ad below, touting the streamlined, bullet-nosed Champion design ("free from bulging excess bulk that might squander your gasoline") seems to be in an egalitarian spirit; after all, it asks what a farmer, not a movie star, thinks of their new car...
During the late Forties and early Fifties, Gene Smith's approach to his art brought him into frequent conflict with the editors of Life, but he produced landmark photo essays of ordinary people like "Country Doctor" in 1948. His pioneering 1951 essay on a black nurse, Maude Callen, serving an impoverished community in rural North Carolina, led to the funding of a foundation serving that community.
What finally happened to the artist who made "Dream Street", and to the company that made the dreaming car? Smith's project of making an epic visual symphony of the Pittsburgh photos blew his budget and never came to fruition, but he organized some of his best shots into a spread in the 1959 Popular Photography Annual. Smith's goal of documenting a story in such a complete way that it would change minds was finally met beginning in 1971, when he documented the catastrophe that befell the Japanese town of Minimata as a result of mercury poisoning by the Chisso Company, whose hired thugs beat the photographer so badly that his vision was damaged...
Some justice resulted from publication of Smith's photos. In 1974 Minimata survivors won their first lawsuit against the Chisso Company. Smith's definitive book, a pioneer on the environmental justice shelves entitled Minimata, was published the following year. W. Eugene Smith began a teaching career at the University of Arizona in November 1977, and died from a massive stroke at age 59 in October 1978. It wasn't until the arrival of a new century that his Pittsburgh Project photos would get a comprehensive viewing in their home city; the Carnegie Museum of Art mounted this show in November 2001. A book on the Pittsburgh Project, entitled Dream Street, finally appeared last year.*
Studebaker, like W. Eugene Smith, sometimes flirted with bankruptcy, but managed to produce some memorable work that rose to the level of art. The company's board of directors gave up manufacturing cars in the US after the 1964 model year, despite the best efforts of company president Sherwood Egbert, who wanted to keep going with the new cars his team of industrial designers had produced. Somehow, though, they'd never managed to make a friendlier-looking car than the Bulletnose...
*Footnote: A selection of W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh photos entitled "Dream Street" was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. A film dramatizing Smith's efforts to document the human cost of years of mercury poisoning by the Chisso Corporation was first shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020. The film,"Minimata", directed by Andrew Levitas, features Johnny Depp in the role of W. Eugene Smith. Possibly due to the global pandemic, it was not released in the US until February 2022.
For more details on Dennis Varni's unique Bulletnose Woody hot rod pictured last above, see "Green Streamline Dream", posted here on June 12, 2017. Other posts involving Studebakers include "Forgotten Classic: 1953-'54 Studebaker Starliner---Sleeping Beauty from South Bend" (Feb. 20, 2021), "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie" (Sept. 1, 2015), "Max Hoffman: An Eye for Cars, and the Studebaker Porsche" (May 2, 2016), "Lines of Influence: The Avanti and How It Grew" (Feb.17, 2016), "Lines of Influence Part 2: Avanti Antecedents" (Feb. 18. 2016), "They Don't Build 'Em Like They Used To..." (Feb. 24, 2016) and "Vanished Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress, 1933" (May 31, 2020).
Photo Credits:
Top: Magnum Photos & the Heirs of W. Eugene Smith
2nd, 4th & 5th: Studebaker Corporation
3rd: Artsy Auctions
6th: Henry Holt & Company, Publishers
7th: The University of Chicago Press
Bottom: the author
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