Title:
Simple truth. By: Gunnell, Barbara, New Statesman, 13647431, 02/07/2000, Vol. 129, Issue 4472
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SIMPLE TRUTH
Section: the back half
PHOTOGRAPHY
BARBARA GUNNELL on the belated rise to fame of William Gedney
William Gedney's subjects rarely acknowledge the photographer's presence. They appear to ignore the
viewer, too, frequently showing us their backs and occasionally staring through us as if we were
irrelevant, even boring, to them. In only a few portraits does the subject lift a wide-eyed gaze to the
camera. For the most part, Gedney's people act out the rhythms of unobserved lives.
Until recently, Gedney' s work, too, remained unobserved, despite an auspicious start to his career. In
1968, as an unknown photographer in his early thirties, Gedney was given a one-man show at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. He exhibited 44 black-and-white pictures of Kentucky coalminers
and San Francisco hippies. Well received at the time, the images and their publicity-shy creator, faded
quickly from public attention, cherished only by a handful of enthusiasts and colleagues. By the time of
his death from Aids in 1989, the 56-year-old Gedney had amassed a significant body of largely unseen
work. The English essayist Geoff Dyer was an early enthusiast, and he has co-edited a book of selected
Gedney photographs and journal extracts. Its publication last month coincided with the opening of an
exhibition at the MOMA in San Francisco of the original 44 prints, along with a selection from the
thousands of other photographs that Gedney took over three decades. More than 30 years after the
first exhibition, and 11 years after his death, Gedney is finally gaining recognition.
Throughout his life, Gedney kept journals in which he transcribed excerpts from a wide range of writers
- novelists, poets, philosophers, journalists-constantly gnawing at and questioning concepts such as
objectivity, honesty, reality and truth (the book's title, What Was True, is taken from one such passage).
The Kentucky photographs reflect all these concerns. Apparently in the tradition of photographs of
impoverished farming families during the 1930s Depression, Gedney's pictures in fact break from this
social-commentary format. He does not portray misery and grainy poverty as viewed by an "objective"
reporter. Instead, his pictures appear to come from within the community he portrays. No one poses; no
one is pitiful. No social statements are made. We see adults and children being themselves- dragging on
a newly lit cigarette, catching the warmth of sun by lying across the metal bonnet of an old car, giving a
tired child a piggyback - and always surrounded by the real props of their actual lives (engine parts,
drying washing, zinc buckets).
Gedney first went to Kentucky in 1964, arranging through the coal miners' union to stay with a family
there. He stayed for 11 days with Vivian and William Cornett and their 12 children, and maintained a
friendship through letters for 15 years. When, in 1977, he finally earned money from one of the
Kentucky photographs-three barefoot young girls peeling potatoes in the kitchen - he sent the family
half the $70 dollars, to fulfil an undertaking he had made 13 years earlier.
The kitchen photograph is hallmark Gedney. The children ape each other's body language and clearly
belong together (concealing a fourth child whom the casual observer easily misses). They seem oblivious
to the camera, spatially separated from it by an expanse of bare floorboard. The physical ease of siblings
together continued to fascinate Gedney (he wondered in his notebook whether it came from so many
sharing the same bed when they were children), and the pictures from his second visit in 1972 continue
to explore the physical connectedness of the family in an always affectionate, sometimes ungainly,
ballet of arms, cars and cigarettes.
In 1969, Gedney went to India, where he stayed for 14 months. At first, he found the frantic pace of life
and vivid colour of the country disturbing. "The vision is exhausting," he wrote in his journal. "You see
too much, your eyes want rest." For several months, his diary is sour and ill-humoured ("bought another
melon, this one is bad, too", "bastards, all they want is money"), until five or six months into his trip,
when he started to notice the kind of balletic beauty of limbs and cloth that mark his best photographic
images: "A simple piece of cloth can be made elegant.., by the way it hangs and moves with the human
frame... Limbs seem capable of an endless variety of curved relationships. Hands and fingers held in the
most intricate expressive gestures."
Dyer has ranked the Benares photographs alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson's images of India, and
certainly Gedney shares Cartier-Bresson's ability to capture the telling instant. But Gedney found it hard
to be unobtrusive in India, and therefore to observe without changing things. The Indian children lack
the insouciance of the young Cornetts, and Gedney writes of trying to "experiment photographing out
of my door, except kids get in the way all the time".
Gedney was a solitary man, and his journals suggest that, towards the end of his life, he was also lonely.
In 1984, he transcribed from Henry James's letters: "The port from which I set out was, I think, that of
the essential loneliness of my life." But Gedney's aloneness never obliterates his humanity. In 1971, he
wrote of his colleague Diane Arbus, the week after she committed suicide, that "her favourite subjects
were the weirdos of society... the grotesque and ugly but always human-marked people, vulnerable to
pain".
This sparse and accurate assessment of a photographer he much admired sums up both their difference
and their similarity. Gedney, unlike Arbus, never finds the grotesque in people. But they are always
"human-marked".
"What was True." the photographs and notebooks of William Gedney" edited by Margaret Sartor and
co-edited by Geoff Dyer is published by W W Norton, priced £23
Unobserved: William Gedney's ballet of real life
~~~~~~~~
By Barbara Gunnell
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