Elliott Erwitt was only twenty-two when Roy Stryker (formerly boss of the FSA Photo Division during the Depression and early war years) asked him to come to Pittsburgh in 1950 to join a small group of photographers under Stryker's direction. He had been commissioned by Allegheny Conference on Community Development to capture a modern Pittsburgh rising from the steel heavy city of past decades. Of the ten in the group Erwitt was the second youngest and certainly the least well known among others like Esther Bubley, Harold Cosini, Arnold Eagle, Russell Lee, and Sol Libsohn.
Oddly, for a photographer Erwitt didn't drive (he came from New York on a Greyhound bus) so he walked around the city and this enabled him to take photos of gritty streets and the people who lived in them. The pictures are full of blacks and dark greys and actually show very little of a changing Pittsburgh but others in Strykers team did capture the new city which is best revealed in a beautiful looking book: Witness to the fifties: the Pittsburgh photographic library 1950-1953 (ISBN 0822941112) with more than a hundred photos including fifteen by Erwitt.
This is a wonderful selection of Erwitt's photos (with about eighty) but unfortunately the book's layout is very poor. The images bleed off the page in different sizes in an attempt create visual interest which isn't necessary with photos this good. In two cases photos are butted together into the book's spine. The Witness... title I mentioned above looks good because, although the photos are different sizes, they are all centred on the page with generous margins and a caption. Another annoyance with the GOST book is that all the captions are on one back page so the reader has to flip backwards and forwards.
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