WHAT WAS TRUE The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney Edited by Margaret Sartor An extraordinary and stirring collection of photographs and writing by an enigmatic photographer whose work is published here for the first time.
William Gedney died in 1989 at the age of 56. He left behind a lifetime of photographic work, most of it unknown outside of a few colleagues and
curators, John Szarkowski, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus among them.
These photographs—taken primarily in New York, San Francisco, Kentucky,
and India—are remarkable in their sympathetic and quietly sensual view of the world. They illuminate the rare, lyrical vision of a photographer who, while living a highly reclusive personal life, was able to record the lives of others with remarkable sensitivity and poignancy. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment window to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney's unobtrusive view reveals the beauty and mystery of each individual life. Excerpts from Gedney's correspondence and notebooks help us discover this intensely private man who captured the people and places around him with such striking clarity and intimacy.
Visit an online archive of Gedney's work at the Digital Scriptorium at the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library website.
One of The Village Voice's "Top Ten Photography Books of 1999": "Gedney, clear-eyed and unromantic, seems to connect with something sweet, bruised, and intimate in his subjects—something about desire and loss that still resonates." Published in association with W. W. Norton & Company |