Matthew Newton @matthewnewton - Tumblr Blog

Shopping Mall in good company at Octavia Books in New Orleans.

American Dream Sequence: Left Behind in the Monongahela River Valley

Today, nearly 100 years since John Kane painted the Monongahela River Valley as a place of American ingenuity and promise, the landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of an industry that once seemed unstoppable. In towns from Monessen and Rankin to Braddock, Duquesne, and Clairton, residents are in the midst of a decades-long postindustrial depression that shows no signs of letting up. These towns are outliers that reaped little benefit from Pittsburgh’s transformation to a hub of medical research and higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. And they exist at a remove from the city’s current economic renaissance, where neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty are being remade into increasingly affluent hipster enclaves as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Uber, and Intel have set up headquarters in the city.

Nowhere in recent memory are the present-day realities in the Monongahela River Valley better documented than in photographer Pete Marovich’s Searching for Dream Street project, which offers an unvarnished look at the socioeconomic status of the old steel towns along the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Marovich, an award-winning photojournalist and contributor to Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Getty Images, and NBC News, has visited dozens of towns in and around Pittsburgh over the last several years to gain an intimate understanding of what life after industry both looks and feels like. Inspired by photographer W. Eugene Smith’s extensive documentation of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s, which was later chronicled in the book Dream Street, Marovich’s photographs of the Monongahela River Valley capture everyday moments in these working-class towns long after the smoke has lifted.

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Enormously important, unprecedented letter to the President from 24 United States Senators, including Bernie Sanders, outlining how defunding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities – which is Trump’s plan – will assault creative culture and the very fabric of American society.

Since its inception in 1965, the NEA alone has given away $46 million in grants to writers. For a writer, an NEA grant can make the difference between taking a year off to complete a book and toiling at a day job. It isn’t hard to imagine that without these grants, some of the most important writers of the past half-century may have never published the works for which they are now beloved. (Among them was Audre Lorde, who spoke up passionately for the importance of arts funding.)

Letter scans courtesy of the Academy of American Poets, who organized the initiative.

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1960s Civil Rights Era, Bob Adelman

For those unfamiliar, Bob Adelman was the iconic photographer behind many of the thought-provoking, historical photographs of the Civil Rights Movement.

A photographer and protest marcher, he spent a considerable amount of time fighting for justice and equal rights. His images capture groundbreaking moments, such as student sit-ins, Freedom Riders, the March on Washington and other significant events in Black history.

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Fragile Innocence at the Morning Bus Stop

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Welcome to Stevia Sphere’s Virtual Mall 2000, a mall of the new millennium! Hyperrealistic ponds, interdimensional escalators, identical-to-life plant graphics and of course futuristic shopping! You will not believe your eyes when you see the mall emulation that our Y2K-ready computer system is capable of! Scent, vision and touch will be transferred directly into your brain through Direct Telepathic Link™. Includes shopping-enhancing soundtrack provided by our CEO himself!

Warning: Virtual Shopping can cause headaches, neck pain, limb numbness, nausea, anxiety and heart attacks.

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Between Truth and Fiction: Pittsburgh’s Burden of Identity

Today, Pittsburgh is very much a city trapped between two worlds: the black-skies legacy of the past, when steel-mill smokestacks turned day into night, and the brighter (albeit pretentious) present-day reality as the “Portland of the East.” The latter notion represents a dramatic shift in identity, of course, and one that is still in the early stages of germination. But as word spreads that Pittsburgh—once dubbed the “Paris of Appalachia” by writer Brian O’Neill—is stocked with affordable housing, good schools, and kind people, curious outsiders from cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland will continue arriving to stake out their claims.

Yet outside the city, remnants of the past are everywhere you look. Pittsburgh’s surrounding mill towns, places that once epitomized the blue-collar pedigree of American labor, now languish in near-obsolescence from the forty years since steel manufacturing slowed to a trickle in Western Pennsylvania. In the Monongahela River Valley, where tightly packed mill houses cling to steep hillsides, the muddy banks of The Mon are still dotted with reminders of the steel industry—rusted blast furnaces gone cold, hot metal bridges that lead to nowhere, brownfields poisoned by PCBs and sulfate. It’s not at all surprising then that Scott Cooper was attracted to the tragic beauty of Braddock as the setting for Out of the Furnace or that John Hillcoat imagined Western Pennsylvania’s postindustrial valley as the postapocalyptic wasteland of The Road. What is surprising, however, is that for the people in these towns who have struggled for so long—not only with poverty and joblessness, but also against violence and addiction—the social and economic reality has remained virtually unchanged for decades. And for the mill towns that exist at a remove from Pittsburgh’s current renaissance, the future doesn’t look much different.

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Photograph: From Ross Mantle’s In the Wake series.

In February 2015, curator Brett Yasko asked 252 Pittsburgh artists to each make a portrait of the same person: John Riegert. What followed was a journey through studios, coffee shops, parks, museums, riverbanks, universities, cemeteries, artists’ homes, and John’s own home. It all culminated with the exhibition John Riegert where, among the portraits, John acted as docent—telling stories of each artist and their work, as well as stories of his own. The process, artist encounters, and exhibition are all documented on the John Riegert Tumblr.

My contribution to the exhibition was a “Dear John” letter, inspired by a conversation I had with John in his Millvale apartment on October 28, 2015. Before that night, we had never met. And while we had a tentative plan going in to our talk, things quickly went astray. My letter revisits the ups and downs of our conversation—partly a record of that moment we shared and partly a confessional.

Photograph by Tom Little. Click to enlarge.