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Wilson is a free-lance writer for the Post-Gazette.
The man is intent on his shaving. He crouches to see his face in the mirror, stretches his skin taut. His vest and pants have parted to expose an expanse of clean, white shirt. He is too busy keeping up appearances to think about being photographed. He is living in a shantytown in the Strip District, early in the 1930s.
"You can tell he is looking in a mirror because you can see the light reflecting off of it," explains Frank Watters, director of Photo Antiquities Museum of Photographic History on the North Side.
He pauses. "Am I crazy?"
The answer is no, he isn't. Watters simply sees more in a photograph than most people do.
One person with a similar knack was Edward P. Salamony, a young photographer sent to Shantytown by the Bulletin Index, a publication of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.
Now Salamony's photographs, and the Shantytown that was so nearly forgotten, can be seen in "Shantytown: The Ed Salamony Photographs," opening today in a benefit for Photo Antiquities, the Homeless Children & Family Emergency Fund, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and Neighbors in the Strip.
The 15 photographs taken by Salamony and five others from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania Department document life in Shantytown, built in the shadow of Old St. Patrick's Church at 17th Street and Liberty Avenue and overseen by the Rev. James R. Cox. He was famous in the 1930s for organizing soup kitchens, bread lines and a march on Washington to bring attention to the plight of the hungry during the Depression.
Salamony was born in 1910 and was a photojournalist most of his life. He spent time overseas during World War II, but for 26 years he worked for local newspapers documenting some of the more trying years of Pittsburgh's history. His connection with Watters is of more recent vintage.
Watters, Irish by birth, trained as a photojournalist in Dublin and worked for the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Irish...