The black-and-white photographs stand alone on their own merits.
Sometimes stark, sometimes playful, sometimes poignant, Charlee Brodsky's images of Homestead and the Waterfront, the shopping center that replaced a steel mill along the banks of the Monongahela River, need no explanation.
But Brodsky, a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University, knew there were hidden stories pictures alone could not tell. She enlisted writers Jane McCafferty and Jim Daniels, colleagues at CMU, to add words to the photos.
"What they're doing is bringing character to the images," Brodsky says of the book, "From Milltown to Malltown," which combines her photographs with poems by McCafferty and Daniels. "They're making them have individual voices; they're making them a little bit less generic. I think that by working with the image and by working with the voice they bring to those images, we have more of a sense of place, a true place. It's like fiction. In the very beginning, we say these poems are not based on any one person or any thing, but it becomes more real. We're imagining in our head who these people are who walk these streets, who lived here, who go shopping at the Waterfront. It makes it a more tangible place for me."
Brodsky's photos were shot in Homestead (the Milltown portion of the book) and at the Waterfront (Malltown). There are images of abandoned buildings and residents, the apartment complexes at the Waterfront and people who work in stores and restaurants.
The writers, used to following what McCafferty calls "the wild, roaming beast" that is the imagination, relished the opportunity to confine their writing to set reference points.
"What really impressed me is that it's not arbitrary what you come up with," McCafferty says. "The photograph is really, in some sense, determining what comes out, even though there's a variety of things that might happen. It feels like there's an inevitability. I guess it's sort of like imposing a form on a poem.'
The images inspired a range of perspectives. A long view of the Loews Theater prompted Daniels to compare the building's facade to "the uncombed hair of an adulterous lover/after a night of disgust and disappointment." In a photograph of a woman blowing a bubble, McCafferty recognizes children in the background who are "Eager, curious as they look off/camera for what might/be coming to the rescue."
"I think it speaks to the subtlety of the photographs," McCafferty says. "They're not in-your-face, literal photographs. They're playful, and they're subtle, and there are ways to enter them; there are all kinds of points of view in the photographs."
McCafferty and Daniels found humor in some of the photos. An oversized advertisement for a restaurant became Daniels' "Coming Soon: Monster Hamburger Takes Over Universe?" McCafferty turned the photograph "Future Resident Parking Only" into a Seinfeldian plea not to get a parking ticket.
"There are absurdities in there that you can't help but try to figure out," Daniels says.
One theme that emerges in "From Milltown to Malltown" is the inexorable march of progress. Homestead has been irrevocably changed by the loss of the steel industry. To have that replaced with a parcel of land devoted strictly to commerce is not necessarily a tragedy.
"We didn't want it to be a simplification, that the Waterfront is bad," Daniels says. "There are human beings in these places, and this is their environment. We were looking at it at that level in terms of how people interact with that environment."
"I think we all have a story we want to tell," Brodsky says, "so we were always going back to 'What is the story?' And I think the story is based on a real place. We wanted to be relatively truthful to what we felt the story was, and that was the history of this place and how it's evolving, what we're losing and perhaps even what we're gaining."
Brodsky remembers taking photos of Waterfront and talking to young people who had no idea of the land's history. They didn't realize the dozen smokestacks near the entrance of the center were once part of an industrial site that provided jobs and sustenance for thousands of families in the Mon Valley.
"So much of the project is about respecting ghosts," McCafferty says, "and asserting history where it's being erased. It can't really be erased if you're thinking of the spirit of the place.'
By Rege Behe, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 7, 2010
