Children at Colwell and Pride Streets, Hill District

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.