The Pittsburgh Gigapanorama is assembled from nearly 4000 individual photographs, the 10.49 gigapixel, digital image measures 76 meters long and 12 meters high. The highly interactive image can be accessed at www.gigapanorama.org, along with some 250 close-up “snapshots” taken by the nearly 50,000 people who have viewed the image.

The Gigapanorama was created as part of the High Point Pittsburgh Investigation, an ongoing effort centred largely on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University to imagine how the U.S. Steel Tower rooftop might be transformed into a sustainable, publicly accessible facility.

The Gigapanorama has been incorporated into an Internet-accessible, virtual simulation of the Viewseum at High Point Pittsburgh that the investigation has produced. It’s all part of an effort to make High Point Pittsburgh a reality, using imagination and art to change reality.

People from Pittsburgh like to think they are different. And they are. Up until a few years ago, the number-one rated radio station in the market was on the AM dial. That hasn’t been the case in other major American markets for decades. When Pittsburgh had the luxury of two daily newspapers, the evening paper was dominant, unlike in most cities. And for fifteen years, when Coors Light was the best selling beer in the US, local brewer Iron City had a greater market share.

There are seven colleges and universities in the city of Pittsburgh proper. Until five years ago, no college or university in the region offered a BFA or BA in photography. And the one that exists now, at Point Park University, is a BFA offered within the journalism department; it started as a partnership between Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Point Park. There are still no graduate programmes for photography here. It’s been a long time since photography was considered little more than a curious adjunct to painting and sculpture. Is Pittsburgh really that different?

Even the venerable Museum of Art at the Carnegie did not recruit a photo curator until 2009, despite over a hundred years of hosting the International, one of the most important regular surveys of contemporary art in the world.

How did this happen? How did a city with no academic and very little museum support, few serious art collectors and even fewer collectors of photography manage to cough up some of the most memorable American photographs of the mid-twentieth century?

It was happening in spite of local artistic proclivities. It started with photographers coming from outside of the region to document table-clearing civic change in what was known as Renaissance I. At the behest of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (a public/private partnership charged with helping to clean up the city’s water and air), an organization called the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL) was formed to document the massive redevelopment of Downtown. This would include not only flood and pollution control but also the largest building boom in the city’s history.

Even before Renaissance I. Luke Swank brought national exposure to Pittsburgh with his images of the city in the late 1930’s. But it was in 1948, when Roy Stryker was invited to Pittsburgh to replicate a project he had completed for Standard Oil, that the Pittsburgh photographic scene found cultural purchase. Stryker assembled an elite group of photographers including James Blair, Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Arnold Eagle, Elliot Erwitt, Clyde Hare, Russell Lee, Sol Libsohn and Richard Saunders. Clyde ‘Red’ Hare loved Pittsburgh so much that he stayed and continued documenting the city until he died in October 2009. Other than Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, no other photographer in the history of Pittsburgh is more closely associated with the character of the city. Harris, who took thousands of pictures for The Pittsburgh Courier, left behind an incredible archive of life in the African-American community, from the thirties through the sixties.

The PPL project and its history are beautifully documented in the 1999 University of Pittsburgh book Witness to the Fifties, The Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950-1953. It served as a reference for this article.

Hare would be the common denominator linking mid-twentieth century Pittsburgh to contemporary Pittsburgh. Since Renaissance I, the city has been in a constant state of rebirth while managing to maintain much of its early twentieth-century architecture. Many photographers have mined the beauty of degrading industrial infrastructure to great effect. After all, few man-made things are more photogenic than rust.

Eugene Smith spent years in Pittsburgh capturing the city and sharing the resulting images with the world. The legendary photographer Weegie and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage also fell in love with Pittsburgh’s urban landscape, both spending considerable time here in the fifties and sixties.

Contemporary photography in Pittsburgh is far less self-referential than it was in the mid 1900’s. Martha Rial, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, continues to cross the globe creating stunning photo essays that appear locally and nationally. Silver Eye Center for Photography, a critically acclaimed gallery and membership organization on Pittsburgh’s South Side, routinely mounts shows that highlight work from around the world.

Recently, Carnegie Mellon University has seriously stepped up its photo offerings, thanks largely to Martin Prekop, who served as Dean of the College of Fine Arts for a decade. His successor, Hilary Robinson, continued to build the design programme and paved the way for world-class talent like Associate Professor Dylan Vitone. Improved facilities allowed artists, like Professor Charlee Brodsky, to broaden the curriculum. While they still don’t offer a degree in photography, their undergraduate and graduate students are receiving elite instruction.

Robert Morris University, just outside Pittsburgh, has been growing a new and influential media arts programme. Notable artists on faculty are Christine Holtz and multimedia artists Carolina Loyola-Garcia and Hyla Willis. (Willis received her MFA from CMU.)

At the Penn State’s McKeesport campus, abstract photographer and RISD MFA graduate Lori Hepner is generating a great deal of attention both locally and, now, nationally with her mesmerizing, mostly abstract work. Since 2008 she has had solo shows in California, Texas, Pittsburgh and Durham, North Carolina.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a modest-sized newspaper in a modest-sized city, has a remarkable stable of ‘shooters’. Rial is an alumnus, as is the astonishing Annie O’Neill. Former Pittsburgh Press and current National Geographic photographer Lynn Johnson lives in Pittsburgh and her images of Fred Rogers remain iconic tributes to one of the most loved figures of twentieth-century America. The current application of the Post-Gazette reflects the paper’s continued commitment to photography including Rebecca Droke, Lake Fong, Bill Wade, John Heller, Darell Sapp and Andy Starns.

Alongside nationally recognised fine art photographers, such as Filmmakers’ Professor Sue Abramson, the work of Mark Perrott, Brian Cohen, Martin Prekop, Lorraine Vullo, Richard Kelly, Seth Dickerman and dozens of others is collected internationally.

But in Pittsburgh, not so much.

I own work by every photographer mentioned in the paragraph above, I’m grateful to say. And at the risk of sounding overly self-referential, Pittsburgh Filmmakers has been a thick bonding agent in the Pittsburgh photographic community since the early 1970’s. But no less important is the Photographic Section of the Academy of Science and Art, a group that has been meeting in the Pittsburgh region three times a month since 1885. Seriously. 1885. That predates most of the salons and general support groups that sprang up in New York City in the early 1900’s.

So, Pittsburgh is different and not so different. Like many cities, its citizens may fail to recognise what they have, but that’s true of a lot of places.

I sometimes refer to it as mass-hysterical low self-esteem.