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  • After the Smoke Clears: Struggling to Get By in Rustbelt America
  • Stuart W. Leslie (bio)
After the Smoke Clears: Struggling to Get By in Rustbelt America. By Steve Mellon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Pp. 136. $29.

Legendary photographer Eugene Smith arrived in Pittsburgh in 1955 to capture "the city as a living entity" and "the people who give it heart and pulse," as he told the Guggenheim Foundation. Thirty-six years old, Smith had just left the staff of Life, where he had established his reputation as America's premier photojournalist, for editorial independence and the opportunity to take the measure of Steel Town at full blast. What Smith called a "man-breaking city" nearly broke him, financially and physically. He never completed his elegy to heavy industry and its human toll. Yet his images of midcentury Pittsburgh at work and worship, its public ambitions and private anxieties, remain an indelible portrait of American manufacturing at high noon, a gray, grim, gritty place where smoke and smokestacks define the skyline.

Steve Mellon lost his job as a photographer when the Pittsburgh Press [End Page 864] shut down in 1992 rather than negotiate a new contract with its employees. With something of Smith's sense of anger, alienation, and irony, Mellon set out to document a dying manufacturing economy in steel towns (Homestead and Braddock, Pennsylvania), mill towns (Lewiston, Maine), mining towns (Matewan, West Virginia) and auto towns (Flint, Michigan). Where Smith considered the city itself his subject, Mellon looked for the people who had gained meaning from these places, and had given meaning to them in return. He might not have Smith's eye (who does?), but he has a superb ear and a knack for coaxing intimate and revealing stories from his subjects. Instead of Smith's admirably ambitious but unfinished portrait, we have a set of memorable snapshots of people trying to cope with and make sense of a world collapsing around them. Mellon draws out their frustration and fear, but also their courage and resilience.

Other photographers have captured the desolation of abandoned factories and boarded-up main streets. Economists and historians have chronicled what Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone called "The Great U-Turn." But no one has brought home that story with quite the same passion and pathos as Mellon. These are not down-and-out steelworkers, miners, or auto assemblers, but witnesses to the betrayal of the American dream, as eloquent as anything Bruce Springsteen has penned. Mellon seeks out his subjects in restaurants, bars, churches, in their homes and less frequently at work. His is not the quest of an ethnographer, with notebook, camera, tape recorder, and methodology. Rather, he comes as a kindred spirit who has faced down the same demons, and the people he talks to appreciate that. Like them, he once defined himself by his job, and now understands the limitations of that definition. He does not so much write history as discover it through the eyes of the people who lived it, much as the reader discovers these towns though Mellon's eyes.

The most engaging chapter by far is on Matewan, the West Virginia coal town made famous in John Sayle's film. Here the journey takes a personal turn. Mellon's father grew up nearby. People have not forgotten Matewan's bitter labor battles, but they are more than willing to let its memories rest in peace. With sufficient prodding, they will acknowledge what happened, even share a memento or two, most poignantly a family photograph pierced by a bullet from hired company thugs. Still, they seem to prefer an uncertain future to a painful past. What Mellon is really seeking is a connection with his father, a man he never really knew, "a man brought to an early death by a job he couldn't escape, a job that diminished him as it defined him."

Paradoxically, Mellon separates his images from his text, except for cropped and sometimes deliberately faded versions of the photographs. He further divides the images into "Places" and "People" even though he would be the first to acknowledge how much each shapes the other. The "People" are much...

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