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A recent trip to Pittsburgh Filmmakers revealed the following scrawled in black permanent marker on a white wall: "I dreamt last night I proposed to a girl who was wearing no clothes. In her garden for hours I watered her flowers and woke up with a drip from my hose."

While dirty little ditties like this are of the kind one might find on the wall of a men's room stall, this lewd limerick was found instead on a wall in the New Gallery.

But before condemning the crude hand responsible for the scrawled poem, consider this, it was written on the wall by Duane Michals.

Somewhere between poet and prankster, photographer and philosopher, lies Michals, an internationally recognized commercial and fine-art photographer based in New York City. But more than an acclaimed artist, he also is an artist with a distinctive Pittsburgh pedigree.

Born in McKeesport in 1932, Michals is the son of a steelworker and stay-at-home mom. Like many Pittsburgh-area artists, his early interest in art was nurtured in Saturday afternoon art classes at Carnegie Museum of Art during the 1940s. In 1953, he received a bachelor of arts from the University of Denver, and went on to spend a year studying graphic design at the Parsons School of Design in Brooklyn.

But it was a three-week trip to Russia in 1958 when Michals interest in photography blossomed. By 1960, this relatively self-taught shutterbug was shooting for Esquire, Vogue and Mademoiselle.

Since then, awards have been abundant, including a gold medal for photography from the National Arts Club in New York in 1994, and he has published more than 20 books of his more personal and exploratory photographic works. Books such as "The House I Once Called Home," an autobiographical work of sorts from which a few images are included on three of the walls in Pittsburgh Filmmakers's New Gallery.

One, of course, hangs below the aforementioned limerick. But there are many more writings by Michals on the walls that accompany the photographs.

Michals has been mixing photography with poetry and prose like this for a long time now. In his books, like on the walls, he scrawls his musings in his inimitable script. They range from simple, borrowed statements, such as "Life is not a dress rehearsal" to entire prose, such as that pertaining to his childhood growing up in McKeesport that accompanies a series of photographs in which Michals has superimposed images of his now-abandoned childhood home, past and present.

The photographs are eerie, profound works that many Pittsburghers will no doubt relate to and many will more than likely draw correlations to ghosts of this mill town's past. But Michals words give them resonance, the only way he can:

"I'll tell you what I know, Father lived incognito in his own house. He was a stranger to his spouse. Jack worked three shifts in Mr. Carnegie's mill for little pay and smoked three packs of Camel's every day. Cigarettes were his best friends, until they betrayed him in the end. Mother said he was a good man and good provider. Between mother and me he was always an outsider."

Other works included in the show reflect Michals' exploration of the homoerotic. In "Jonathan Kills a Fly," a young man looking much like an Adonis from an Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement is depicted wrestling with the guilt after having killed a housefly. Similarly, in "Cavafy Imagines He is a Priest," an obviously conflicted priest struggles with personal longing.

Lastly, a self-portrait says it all. It depicts the photographer holding a book inside of which he has scrawled, "I Think About Thinking."

On view in the adjacent Outer Gallery is work from the Pittsburgh Signs Project.

Supported by a grant from The Sprout Fund, the project was founded in October 2003 by Jennifer Baron and Greg Langel as an artist/writer-run Web site featuring photographs of local signage unique to Pittsburgh (see www.pittsburghsigns.org). But since then, it has grown to function more as a center for community exchange in which more than 100 comments about Pittsburgh culture having been posted on the site, in addition to having received more than 250 submissions of local signage by more than 60 photographers.

In the gallery, 224 of those photographs have been neatly arranged in grid form on large-scale digital prints. They range from landmark signs such as the one from Chief's Cafe and that of The Garden Theater to the recently removed South Hills Motel sign, which Baron herself once photographed for the project.

That sign is gone, having recently been taken down and destroyed by the new owner of the motel along Route 51. "My immediate reaction to the site's abrupt transformation evoked both emotional and physical discomfort," Baron has written in an essay that accompanies her photograph.

She goes on to lament, "Literally a dying breed of commercial archaeology, the sign's lively angles, animated juxtapositions of abstract, organic and geometric shapes, pop-culture imagery, exposed metal beams, and bold, bright pink, brown and orange color combinations remained a welcoming destination situated practically in the back yard of my childhood."

That too, says it all.

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