Snapshots of the steel life

Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer

Luke Swank

Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Galleries

4400… Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer

Luke Swank

Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Galleries

4400 Forbes Avenue, Oakland

(412)622-3131

Luke Swank’s career as a photographer started as a hobby. He initially made his living working in family-owned businesses, such as a hardware store and a car dealership, in Johnstown, Pa.

By 1935, Swank decided to devote himself entirely to photography as a commercial and artistic practice. As a modernist photographer, his name soon appeared on the art circuit alongside highly successful artists like Margaret Bourke-White and Georgia O’Keefe.

After his untimely death in 1944, Swank’s name faded into obscurity and his work has been, for the most part, absent in the art world for decades. Howard Bossen is here to change that.

Bossen, a journalism professor and adjunct curator at the Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University, first discovered Swank while serving as a visiting professor at CMU in 2001. Upon exploring the Carnegie Museum of Art’s and the Carnegie Library’s photography archives, Swank’s work caught his eye.

Without any previous knowledge of Swank and his life history, Bossen knew he had something special in front of him. This began a 4-year research and archival process which resulted in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer.”

“It is a rare privilege for a historian to be able to bring out of the shadowy recesses of historical near-oblivion the work of an artist as talented as Luke Swank,” said Bossen.

For this current exhibition, Bossen has pulled together and titled six categories of Swank’s artistic photos that he worked in throughout his career: “Steel,” “Circus,” “People,” “Transformations,” “Rural Architecture and Landscapes” and “This is My City,” featuring urban photographs of Pittsburgh.

From early on, the steel mills fascinated Swank. Many of his earliest photos are soft depictions of the mills in Johnstown.

His later modernist works done inside the mills are some of his best. Using light and shadows to make both formally stunning and poetic compositions, Swank blurs the lines between documentary photography and the surrealist imagination.

Swank’s concern with the fading trends in American society is best seen in his photos of the circus, a spectacle that was in decline by the late 1930s. Swank takes us “to the backyard of the circus.” Many of the images depict workers setting up and taking down the tents and booths, or performers sitting around during the day before a show.

Bossen is quick to point out that Swank was not fond of portraits and he rarely took them. Yet, from the small collection there is, Swank displays an undeniable mastery in capturing a truth about the human condition.

Two of the photographs in the exhibition, “War Mother 1” and “War Mother 2,” depict anxiety on the faces of mothers whose sons are off at war and reveal a certain hope during a time of despair.

What makes Swank such an extraordinary talent is that, in addition to being a true humanist able to capture the feelings of the time, he was also a master of formal construction.

This is best seen in “Transformations,” that features images of everyday objects transformed or abstracted by light, shadows and perspective. His photograph of a metal ring casting an elongated shadow is one of the most profound pieces in the exhibit for is simplistic beauty.

Luke Swank’s depictions of Pittsburgh throughout the 1930s are amazing for their capacity to provide a unique impression of the times. They also demonstrate that Swank knew how to click the camera at just the right moment to bring out and intensify everything in the frame.

His photograph of a man crossing a street between cast shadows shows this perfectly – if the shot had been taken a second before or after it had, the perfect balance that Swank captured would have been thrown off.

In 1944, at the age of 54, Swank suffered a heart attack that led to his death. His wife, Edith, tried unsuccessfully to enter some of her husband’s work into galleries and shows, but she eventually boxed and stored all of it.

After her death in 1975, Swank’s photography was bequeathed to the Carnegie Library and Museum of Art. Even there, his photos still saw little light and became another addition to the archives.

Bossen hopes to change that and restore Luke Swank’s name as one of the great photographers of the century. “Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer” is at the Carnegie Museum in the Heinz Galleries through Feb. 2. Bosson has also written a book with the same title about Swank’s life and work containing all 141 photographs featured in the exhibition.

“What began as a research project ended as a labor of love,” said Bossen.