Purchased from the 1999 Carnegie International 

Reality and Imagination: Photographs by Luke Swank
 

May 6 through September 3

Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1890, Luke Swank did not become seriously interested in photography until the age of forty. Before then, he held various jobs and took occasional snapshots with his Kodak camera. With the sale of his first photographs of a Bethlehem Steel plant in 1930, Swank launched a successful and prolific career that lasted until his death at age fifty-four.

Swank exhibited his work nationally, taught, maintained a commercial studio, and worked for many publications. The renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz praised his images after the two men spent a day looking at 200 of Swank’s photographs. That same year, Swank had five works accepted in San Francisco’s "First Salon of Pure Photography," more than any other entrant; his 

work was shown alongside such well-known photographers as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Willard Van Dyke. 

Known for his photographs of circuses and steel mills, as well as his architectural surveys, Swank became the University of Pittsburgh’s first official photographer in 1935 and later developed the first college-level course in photojournalism. In 1980, in response to a solo exhibition of Swank’s work at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh photographer Clyde Hare praised his "integrity as to subject and his sensitivity to light and its subtle play." Swank’s brief career ended with his death in 1944. While he gained recognition quickly during his lifetime, his work continues to be highly regarded and was recently seen at Carnegie Museum of Art in the 1997 exhibition Pittsburgh Revealed. 

Reality and Imagination focuses on Swank’s non-documentary photographs, which make use of real objects to create abstract forms. "The photographs that are most interesting," says Linda Batis, Associate Curator of Fine Arts, "are those in which you know there is an object, but you have to struggle to discern what it is. One photograph shows what is obviously a shed, for example, but Swank’s interest is clearly in the shapes that are created by the angles and the shadows. It works as a pattern, rather than a place."