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Pittsburgh has some pretty venerable arts groups, from Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, founded in 1910, to the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, which opened its doors in 1895.
But even the Carnegie greeted its first guests in a city where the Pittsburgh Photography Club had already been operating for a decade.
And the Club (a couple name changes notwithstanding) is still going strong, with 90 members and with exhibits including its 140th Anniversary Show, now at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG) through March 14. The display of recent work by current members — including a few pros, but mostly dedicated amateurs — is supplemented by a selection of photos from the group’s archives, some dating to the time of its founding.
Photography was hardly new when amateur photographer A.S. Murray, working with a dozen fellow enthusiasts, launched The Pittsburgh Amateur Photographers Society, in 1885. But the medium was still largely the preserve of middle-class and affluent folks with the leisure time and the means to afford the day’s cumbersome gear, years before photosensitive glass plates gave way to film.
Murray’s group initially met Downtown, in a building on Fourth Avenue. Unusually for the time, it included three women, according to a history written by Club member Valentino Buttignol. In the 1890s, the Society joined the Art Society, The Engineers Society, The Western PA Architectural Society, the Iron City Microscopical Society and the Botanical Society to found the grand-sounding Academy of Arts and Sciences of Pittsburgh.
The Academy was backed by, among others, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, as well as by Photographers Society member and famed astronomer and lensmaker John A. Brashear.
Soon, the group began a long association with Carnegie’s own namesake museum. (It also changed its name to the “Photographic Section” to reflect its role at the new Academy.) Starting in 1898, and for decades afterward, its big annual photography salon was held at the Carnegie.
It was also at the Carnegie Institute that the group held its meetings, before relocating to a variety of homes including a room at the Cathedral of Learning. In the 1970s, it resettled at the Mount Lebanon Recreation Center and has remained there since, inclusive of its decision to rebrand as a “club.”
In short, the Club — which contends it might be the oldest continually operating photo club in the country — has spanned more than two-thirds of photography’s 200-year history.
That’s included the rise of color photography (in the ’40s) and digital photography (in the ’00s). But the changes haven’t all been technological. For example, art-minded photographers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries went in for “pictorialism,” a style whose soft-focus look mimicked painting styles like impressionism.
To give some idea, the MCG show’s archival selections include a ca. 1886 landscape by Charles K. Archer that more closely resembles an engraving of a huge old tree. Nearby, Helen Manzer’s close-up, sharply focused black-and-white portrait of a young girl from just a few decades later gives a sense of the aesthetic changes that were taking place.
And around the corner, in MCG’s central gallery, you leap ahead in time to the 140th-anniversary showcase of two dozen photos, selected from the group’s in-house contest prize-winners by a committee led by club member Dallas Knight.
There’s lots of nature photography, from Eric B. Heath’s “Galactic Dunes,” which captures an arch of stars over Colorado’s Great Sand Dune National Park and Preserve, to William Shissler’s close-up of a hummingbird supping on a flower in North Park. The images range pretty far afield, from Robert Hayes’ “Fred Overlooking the City” — the North Side Mr. Rogers statue gazing past a mist-shrouded Ohio River toward the Downtown skyline — to Laurie Bruns’ “Fetching Water at Sunrise,” shot in Cambodia.
In addition to maintaining its archive of 750 prints (accessible via an online database), the Photography Club hosts three monthly meetings, including technical talks. It also organizes group photo walks, as nearby as the Smithfield Street Bridge and as distant as the Olympic National Peninsula, in Washington state.
Knight, himself a lifelong hobbyist, says the group is in talks with the Library of Congress to acquire its archive. “It’s kind of a statement on the significance of Pittsburgh in the development of photography in the United States,” he says.
In a world where photography is far more widely and casually practiced than one could have imagined in 1885 (or even 1985), the Pittsburgh Photo Club marches on. After the anniversary show, its next big event is the 110th Pittsburgh Salon of Photographic Art. That’s Sat., April 5, at the Mount Lebanon Recreation Center.
