Pittsburgh 1950

In 1950, 22-year-old Elliott Erwitt was commissioned by the legendary Roy Stryker to document Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as it emerged from a notoriously polluted industrial city into a cleaner, more modern metropolis. Shooting for Stryker’s newly organised Pittsburgh Photographic Library, Erwitt’s photographs captured the humanity and spirit of the people of the city against the angular industrial architecture. Drafted into the army in Germany just four months after arriving in Pittsburgh, Erwitt was forced to abandon the project, leaving his negatives behind. For decades, the negatives were held at the Pennsylvania Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and as a result, a majority of the photographs in this book have neither been published nor exhibited before.