By Craig Smith
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Bob Cranmer is a big fan of photographer Ansel Adams.
“He could take an image and see the picture in it. He inspired me to look for pictures,” said Cranmer, 52, of Brentwood.
The former Allegheny County commissioner has organized 81 pictures he took from across the county into a book, “The World Through a Pittsburgh Lens.” Two publishers have expressed interest in the project, Cranmer said.
As a county commissioner from 1996 to 2000, Cranmer traveled the region daily and saw things that appealed to him visually — from hard-edged industrial landscapes in East Pittsburgh to fields with horses grazing in Upper St. Clair.
He made mental notes of those scenes so he could return to photograph them.
“What I saw in all the various buildings and communities was the uniqueness of Allegheny County,” said Cranmer, now director of the Pittsburgh office of Pugliese Associates, a government affairs consultant.
His idea was to capture things “that really could be set someplace else.” The “pictures” he found in his own backyard mimic scenes from Europe.
A view of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in the South Side with a barbed wire fence in the foreground is reminiscent of World War II-era photos. A block of Liverpool Street in Manchester looks like a boulevard in Paris.
His photograph of a pastoral field could have been taken in Scotland. It is across the street from Century III Mall in West Mifflin.
Andy Masich, CEO of the Senator John Heinz History Center, and David Halaas, director of the Center for the French and Indian War at the center, wrote the foreword for the book.
Cranmer has created “a very useful document,” said Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, who has seen a draft of the book.
“He sees it as the first in a series, which is good. If you looked at it by itself, you’d say there needs to be more,” Ziegler said.
Cranmer almost didn’t pursue the photography project. He had set it aside and forgotten about it.
But when he tried his hand at writing a novel, he said he learned a little about publishing and decided to go back and do the photography book.
The novel is a thriller based on a real story — that’s all he’ll say about it. He worked on the book with a ghost writer from New York and has a literary agent who is shopping for a publisher.
The book of photographs “could do something to market the city,” Cranmer said. “It encapsulates how unique we are.”
Craig Smith can be reached at csmith@tribweb.com or 412-380-5646.
