My uncle Bill Keightley, who has died aged 101, was a photographer who specialised in taking pictures of aircraft. He spent most of his career at the Short Brothers aerospace company in Belfast, beginning his photography during the second world war. Some of his work, now of historical interest, is displayed at the Ulster Transport Museum.

Bill began his job at a time when safety measures were rudimentary. He hung out of one plane to photograph another, his foot jamming the door open while his hands held the camera. If things got bumpy, someone might grab his shirt.

Commissioned to photograph Northern Ireland for an aerial map, he lost several pairs of spectacles over a period of a few weeks as successive pairs fell out of the open door to the ground below. He loved the work and always said that he was being paid to do his hobby.

The seventh of 10 children, Bill was born near Ballinderry in County Derry. His parents were Annie (nee Orr), a nurse, who died when Bill was five, and Isaac Keightley, a farmer. He grew up in rural poverty. Hunger was never far away. After leaving school at age 14 he moved to Belfast, where, after taking on a variety of jobs, he began working in the wages department at Short Brothers. He acquired a camera, and on one occasion was asked by his employers to photograph a Short Brothers plane that was flying over Belfast Lough. The photograph came out so well that in 1942 he joined the company’s photographic and printing department.

Bill met his future wife, Ella Wright, at a cycling club in the late 1930s. They married in 1950. The club organised cycling trips throughout Ireland. In return for bringing sugar and other goods hard to find in wartime Belfast back over the border, Bill’s boss paid him when these trips took place in work time.

He remained at Shorts for the rest of his career, mainly photographing aircraft in Belfast and also travelling for work. He covered the Farnborough airshow in Hampshire annually, went to Benbecula in the outer Hebrides and once to Egypt.

Later he became deputy head of the photography department.

After retiring from Shorts in 1986, Bill worked locally for McMeekins, doing photography work for exhibition stands. He finally stopped in 1996.

Bill aged well, looking younger than his years. When his youngest sister, Nessa, was in hospital, Bill visited regularly. One day he found her laughing. A doctor had told her he had spoken with her son. That turned out to be Bill, five years her senior.

Aged 100 Bill commented to his son Alec that he had never ridden in an open-top sports car, and so Alec arranged for him to do so. Thrilled by the experience, Bill was only disappointed that Alec did not drive faster.

Ella predeceased him. Bill is survived by his sons, Alec and Gareth, and four grandchildren, Lex, Nadine, Allison and Thomas.

The Crown

Two Photographs

Season 6

Episode 2

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: Daniel Escale/Netflix

“Two Photographs” comes off as the most anti-Diana episode of season six so far, unfairly painting the adrift princess as the personification of scandal and poor judgment, while the queen continues tut-tutting her ex-daughter-in-law’s behavior from the confines of Balmoral Castle. What the queen doesn’t seem to understand, after decades on the job, is that photos of Diana are still big business.

The cold open features interviews with two distinctly different photographers. First, we have Mario Brenna, the real-life paparazzo who allegedly earned $5 million for the world rights to the first photos documenting Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s romance. Brenna chillingly talks about how paparazzi must “be like hunters, killers,” while he breaches a wall to capture two unnamed celebrities mid-fight.

Next, we have Brenna’s polar opposite: the sedate Scottish portrait photographer Duncan Muir (dude wears a tweed coat, ’nuff said), who has picked up a side hustle taking pics of the royal family. Muir appears to be a fictional character and serves as The Crown’s official acknowledgment of Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022. He’s a guy who calls himself a “proud Elizabethan” and gets giddy when Her Majesty offers a kind hello during a public engagement. Muir spends most of his interview blathering about how the queen united the country and, quite accurately, how “we’ll all miss her terribly when she’s gone.”

Following the credits, Buckingham Palace staff alert the senior royals to the latest problem surrounding the Princess of Wales, with Princess Anne translating for the queen, who apparently doesn’t speak subtle racist: Diana hanging out with the Fayed family is a bad look because the government is afraid Mohamed Al-Fayed will use his new friend as leverage for his long-denied British citizenship. (Mohamed, who died in September 2023, never became a British citizen.)

“Oh, that girl,” sighs the queen.

Her Majesty isn’t wrong with that sentiment, just misguided. The way The Crown tells it, Diana is little more than a sitting duck. While she and Dodi are canoodling on the Jonikal, Mohamed is calling his security guy and demanding a “progress report,” even going so far as putting the maid on the phone to confirm whether Dodi and Diana are “intimate.” GROSS.

Even grosser? As soon as the maid assures her boss that Dodi and Diana share a room and a bed, Mohamed executes the next part of his plan: hiring the ruthless Brenna to capture photos of his son and the Princess of Wales in a torrid embrace. (There is no proof that Al-Fayed hired Brenna, but that’s what’s so good about The Crown — it’s easy to believe his character would.)

Oblivious to Mohamed’s machinations, and just before Brenna snaps his now-infamous photos, Diana and Dodi chat about the rest of her summer plans, but their lighthearted banter has so many morbid overtones that it’s hard not to be completely spooked by this scene. Diana talks about how she “doesn’t get the boys back until the 31st,” Dodi remains vague about his engagement to Kelly Fisher, and then they start flirting — and making out — while discussing land-mine survivors???

Upon Diana’s return to London, news spreads that, somehow, a paparazzo has gotten photos of her and Dodi together on Mohamed’s yacht. How strange, remarks Diana, because wasn’t their location supposed to be private? The queen’s private secretary, Robert Fellowes, warns Her Majesty that these photos were the subject of “the fiercest bidding war in Fleet Street history,” with the Sunday Mirror paying £250,000 for the rights. And because this was the pre-digital, pre-smartphone age, an extensive advertising campaign will lead up to the photos’ publication.

But Diana can’t worry about that right now because she’s about to see her sons for the last time. William and Harry head off to Balmoral with their father but not without William, still the audience’s stand-in, mentioning to his mother that Dodi is “weird.” Oh, listen to your son, Diana!

The Crown also gives Diana and Charles a nice final exchange here, with Charles commending Diana for the work she has been doing to raise awareness about land mines and the pair making a mutual promise to be “brilliant” at co-parenting. Maybe if Charles, Diana’s “friend [and partner] of her dreams” had said Dodi was weird, she might have listened. But that’s idealistic thinking, just like this whole interaction is in the first place.

While the royals are in Scotland, Diana heads to Bosnia to visit land-mine victims. These scenes are nice reminders of what we all knew back then: She really was in her element doing humanitarian work. Although Diana did go to Bosnia in August 1997, The Crown takes creative liberties here with its reenactment of the princess’s walk through a minefield. That famous event, with Diana covered in protective equipment, took place in Angola in January 1997.

Unfortunately for Diana, nobody cares that she risked her life in an actual minefield or that she’s championing a serious cause: At the time of her minefield walk, newspapers featuring an 11-page spread of her and Dodi frolicking in the Mediterranean arrive at Balmoral. The queen is disgusted. William is humiliated. Charles is oddly curious; Harry catches his pa sneaking a peek, LOL.

Mohamed, on the other hand, is delighted.

Diana attempts a press conference focusing on her humanitarian mission, but all the paps want to ask about is her relationship with Dodi. In many ways, this trip was an abject failure, and it might have caused Diana to slip back into her old self-harm habits: We see her biting into her finger so deeply it leaves a mark.

Never mind the effect of the photos on Diana’s mental health — the palace has gone into full damage-control mode. Charles’s private secretary wants to take advantage of the situation with a “counterphoto.” The intention is to emphasize that Diana’s Saint-Tropez lifestyle is synonymous with scandal while Charles’s Balmoral lifestyle is synonymous with dignity. It doesn’t take much to convince Charles because he knows the drill. William and Harry, however, have conditions: They’re not wearing a kilt or carrying a “sheep’s crook” like their pa.

“Trustworthy photographer” Muir, with his tweed jacket and dependable Volvo, is hired to take the famous family snaps of the Prince of Wales, Prince William, and Prince Harry at Balmoral in the summer of 1997. (In reality, Arthur Edwards served as photographer.) Although William and Harry initially aren’t keen on the photo shoot, they eventually warm up to Muir, who encourages them to have fun with each other.

The next round of papers arrives, and the photos are a massive success. Most important, the queen is pleased. The family needs all the good publicity it can get because, as Her Majesty shares with Prince Philip, Diana’s antics are getting worse. The latest piece of gossip is that Diana just flew 160 miles in the Harrods helicopter to visit her psychic friend in Derbyshire — so Dodi could get some direction. Even though I don’t at all like the way Diana is treated in this episode, I do have to agree with Philip’s pitch-perfect reaction here: “Spare me!”

The bottom line is that so much of Diana’s life was a tragedy well before she met her catastrophic death. Maybe if the queen had provided compassion instead of judgment, Diana would still be alive today. But as The Crown has proved time and again, the queen will always choose duty over understanding, which is why her closing monologue, while predictable, remains so infuriating to hear. Over a montage of paparazzi swarming Diana and Dodi, the queen continues to put the blame squarely on Diana, admonishing her for not learning from her mistakes. It’s Diana who is “erratic,” “reckless,” and “out of control.” Not the relentless photographers, her spineless boyfriend, or her unscrupulous “friend” Mohamed Al-Fayed.

“All one wants is for that girl to find peace,” the queen remarks, as the final shot lands on a haunting re-creation of Diana wearing a turquoise bathing suit, sitting forlornly on the Jonikal’s diving board.

Do you, Lilibet? Did you ever truly feel that way?

• It’s hard to find levity in such heavy subject matter, but The Crown succeeds during the senior royals meeting where the “new royal website” is unveiled. Between the dial-up tone and Princess Anne explaining to the bewildered queen mother that “logging on” has “nothing to do with timber,” it’s rather chuckle-worthy.

• Diana’s Duran Duran T-shirt is such a nice touch.

This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O’Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.

Legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith called his signature project, simply, “Pittsburgh.” As in “Pittsburgh is a failure” and “the infinite mistake of Pittsburgh.”

What got him so down? In the 1950s, author Stefan Lorant needed photos for a new book celebrating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial. Smith was a mercurial, New York City-based former World War II combat photographer who had just quit Life magazine. Lorant hired him to spend three weeks here and produce 100 prints.

Lorant got his prints — many known to generations of Pittsburghers from that coffee-table doorstop titled “Pittsburgh: An American City” — but Smith barely knew when to stop.

During his initial stay, in 1955, he became obsessed with the city and documenting it. He roamed from coal mines and steel mills to dusty city sidewalks, pristine public plazas and the steps of the Duquesne Club. He visited multiple times more through 1957, bent on producing a grand, symphonic and likely unprecedented work of photographic art.

Smith never managed it, at least to his own satisfaction. Ultimately, he shot 22,000 exposures. He included a few hundred of them in a 38-page essay published in a photography magazine in 1959, but hated how it turned out.

Smith died in 1978; his work here got a fuller airing with the 2001 publication of “Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project,” a 180-page selection of 175 black-and-white photos and accompanying text edited by Sam Stephenson (with help from folks at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the latter of which holds the rights to many of Smith’s Pittsburgh images).

The book went out of print, but Stephenson and the University Chicago Press have produced a new edition. And on Nov. 17, Riverstone Books will host Stephenson in a virtual conversation with award-winning poet Ross Gay, who wrote the forward to the new edition.

It’s a marvelous collection. Others had memorably photographed the city at mid-century, of course, from Johnstown native Luke Swank, in the 1930s and ’40s, to Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented the Black community here for half of the 20th century. And under the guidance of Roy Stryker, shooters for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library — including talents like Clyde Hare and Esther Bubley — made thousands of images of the city and its people just a few years before Smith arrived.

But Smith’s project is surely the most extensive collection of photos of Pittsburgh conceived in such a brief time period by a single artist. Especially when that artist had relieved himself of obligation to any sort of deadline, or to anything but his vision. Stephenson calls it “the most ambitious project of a major photographer’s career.”

On one page of “Dream Street,” the grand, Ionic-columned interior of Downtown’s old Mellon National Bank, shot from above, is juxtaposed with a separate, street-level image of men standing alongside a message soaped onto a labor union’s storefront window, “No work until further notice.” A police officer in clown makeup at a Shriners parade greets a group of Black children on the Sixth Street Bridge. Steelworkers jovially drink beer and play cards at a picnic. The mills’ fires glow in smoky, artificial twilight. And always, the city’s gruffly photogenic landscape, its steep slopes and river valleys interrupted by the sometimes bold, sometimes desperate assertions of human habitation and industry.

As Smith puts it, “We are so lucky today to have this portrait of America’s primary industrial city at its zenith,” before suburbanization — let alone deindustrialization — fully took hold.

Stephenson originally assembled “Dream Street” while working at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies; more recently, he published the 2017 biography “Gene Smith’s Sink” and learned much more about the famed photographer, including how influenced he was by pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who had his own long-standing association with Pittsburgh. The two were friends, and Stephenson thinks the “cinematic quality to what Smith was trying to achieve in Pittsburgh was partly down to Brakhage.

Stephenson, who now lives in College Station, Texas, was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction writing to support a rather different project, on the cultural impact of alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction. He also ghostwrote singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’ new memoir, “The Secrets I Told You.”

But W. Eugene Smith, and Pittsburgh, remain abiding interests.

The Pittsburgh project was “a failure in Smith’s eyes but not in our eyes,” said Stephenson. “I think he was kind of caught in a bind of his own making” in that there was no way to finish it as he wished. He adds, “I think Smith was really going after poetry instead of journalism.”

More information on Stephenson’s online talk is here.