Luke Swank: A Life and Legacy Rediscovered

The light was flashing on my answering machine. "Hello, my name is Grace Swank Davis. I'm Luke Swank's granddaughter and I'd like to talk to you." An adrenaline rush of excitement left me stunned and speechless. I had been searching for more than a year for Harry Swank, Luke's son, or one of Swank's heirs. To know that a grandchild had somehow found me was exciting and humbling. Maybe I could now fit more pieces of the Luke Swank puzzle together.

It had started with a simple proposition to the curators at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMA) in Pittsburgh. "If you allow me access to the photography collection," rich in photographs that relate to the industrial heritage of western Pennsylvania, "I'll identify a project of mutual benefit." It was January 2002 and I had just begun my semester-long visiting appointment at Carnegie Mellon University. Little did I know where that request would lead; it started me on a journey that revised the history of photography and changed my life. Eventually, my book Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer enabled me to reinsert a magnificent photographer into the discussion of 1930s photographic modernism and give a granddaughter back her grandfather's legacy that had been lost to time.

On my fourth or fifth visit to the photography collection at CMA, one of the two-handled, nondescript metal storage cabinets was opened. A black portfolio case was removed and placed on the large, plain worktable. The curator opened the portfolio and began to show the 20 or so matted, vintage prints of 1930s America. I was struck by the first print's beautiful tonal properties and luminescent light. It was a large print for the 1930s, approximately 11 x 14 inches without the mat. It was urban. I assumed made in Pittsburgh. I was shown a second and a third print. Each one was more impressive than the previous one. By the fifth print I knew I was

Figure 1.

"Man Crossing City Street," c. 1935
9 x 7 inches; mount 18 x 14 inches; signed
Carnegie Museum of Art; Gift of Edith Swank Long by transfer from the Pennsylvania Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 83.40.93

viewing something extraordinary, yet the full name of the photographer hadn't even registered. "Luke who?" I asked. "Luke Swank," she repeated.

As someone who had spent most of his life immersed in the history of photography, how could I never have heard of him? Why had he been lost to history? My task, I came to realize, was to give Luke back his voice, to return his photographs to public consciousness and place his art within the context of the history of photography and American culture.

There was no real order to these photographs as they emerged from the case. The work represented several themes: working-class Pittsburgh; western Pennsylvania rural scenes combining landscape and architecture; portraits of circus clowns; and striking modernist abstractions of steel mills. The images flashed one after another, all astonishingly strong. They connected in a way that I could at that moment sense but not yet fully understand. My excitement swelled as I looked at each image.

I asked the curator how many Luke Swank photographs were in the collection. She told me there were more than 360, plenty to select from for a one-person exhibition and possibly a large enough body of work for a book. Then she let the bomb drop. A sister institution, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, she told me, owned more than 2,000 additional prints and all of Swank's known negatives. As we continued to look at Swank's photographs and she began to tell me what little was known about Swank, I realized I was looking at the work of an artist who had vanished, lost to the shadows of time.

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The Carnegie Library collection of Swank's work, consisting of boxes of contact prints, loose prints, mounted prints, glass-plate stereographs, and color transparencies, presented me with a wealth...