Since its origins, photography has vacillated between art and fact, fantasy and reality. The finest practitioners were able to combine the two threads in artful presentations of real facts. Such luminaries as Eugene Atget and Lewis Hines relied on the camera to document Paris, France (Atget) and exploitive conditions in industrial environments (Hine). Henri Cartier-Bresson explored the art in everyday scenes. The groups assembled by Roy Stryker set out to document the devastating effects of the Great Depression and the terrible effects of the Great Drought in the 1930's, moved on to the efforts to win the Great War in the 1940's, and then to document the efforts to rebuild the heart of the Great Steelmaking City, Pittsburgh in the early 1950's.

The images in this Gallery seek to continue these traditions, documenting conditions in an aging and deteriorating, once-great American city and simultaneously searching for the artful and poetic scenes.