Aperture's Blog, page 51

A British Photographer’s Take on Princess Diana and Cinderella

“How do we take a story like Cinderella out of the archives, off the bookshelves, out of the retail stores and attempt to prise out its latent class content? Its political and social uses?” So wrote the late British artist Jo Spence at the beginning of her 1982 university dissertation, “Fairy Tales and Photography, or, another look at Cinderella.” In this formative illustrated text—republished last year by RRB Photobooks for the first time in its entirety—Spence traces the roots of the age-old tale across time and media, and she finds the shadow of Cinderella everywhere. By deconstructing the evolution of the story through pantomime and folklore, picture books and literature, children’s toys, Disney, and even in the latent messaging of hundreds of advertising images and newspaper headlines, she maps the endless ways the story has been mobilized throughout the decades.

It becomes clear early on in Fairy Tales and Photography that the context from which it emerged is crucial to its reading. When Spence was completing her thesis, she was living in London, and Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. In circumstances echoing the messages at the heart of “Cinderella,” class warfare was particularly intense, and Thatcherism was rigorously rooted in the idea of aspirational politics. The iconic royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana had taken place in July 1981, attracting an estimated 750 million viewers in 74 countries, and the public and media reaction was nothing short of overwhelming. Spence was vocally anti-royal; a left-leaning activist in a conservative country, but nevertheless, she found inspiration through fairytales. For her, “Cinderella”—in its historical treatment of gendered labor, family politics, beauty, and love—was the perfect socialist subject. Slowly, she realized she could use it to interrogate the power structures that shape our lives.

In painfully vivid detail, Spence shows how stories like “Cinderella” condition us from childhood to assume our places in society, teaching readers how to behave appropriately and what to expect from one’s station in life. As her own form of visual resistance, she conjures herself into various roles, refusing to be boxed in, and masquerades at turns as the protagonist, the fairy godmother, and the ugly sisters too. It’s hard not to look upon these acts of self-representation in Fairy Tales and Photography with a strange mix of sadness and bemusement. Her work was comedic, but it was also tragic and hauntingly prescient. “I want to be happy. I can transform myself,” she scrawled in red ink around a self-portrait of herself dressed as a fairy, reminding us of the work she made, years later, on female autonomy and mental health. And in another image from 1982, she assembles a still life of household items and a plastic bust, the price tag “65p” written across one breast. This one in particular feels like a pre-echo of her diagnosis with breast cancer later that year and of her final work attacking the monetization of public health-care systems—made before she lost her battle with the illness in 1992.

Princess Diana’s name has reentered the British news cycle recently, when the BBC finally apologized for its manipulative treatment of her in a controversial and infamous 1995 TV interview. I thought of Spence when this happened and about how the scholar Marina Warner—who knew the artist personally and writes an accompanying text for the publication—said Spence was always “acerbic” about the national love of Diana and the media construction of her as “the people’s princess.” Spence died five years before Diana did, and so she never got to see how that fairy tale went awry. There was more than a little of “Cinderella” in Diana’s story, which became one shaped increasingly by the politics of representation and the power of the camera. “How trenchant [Spence’s] response would have been to the paparazzi’s pursuit of Diana,” Warner notes.

“I am not sure what sort of a ‘future’ photographic theory is offering me at the moment,” Spence wrote in the final pages of her chapter on photography. “I am no longer sure who I am talking to; my photography and writing are fragmented, differing from day to day.” As it turns out, and though it was unknown to her at that time, Spence would spend the next two decades grappling with the medium, its social power, and its limitations, while adding a great deal to the canon of photographic thinking by probing its potential as both educational and therapeutic tool.

All works from Jo Spence: Fairy Tales and Photography, or, another look at Cinderella, 1982
Courtesy RRB Photobooks/The Hyman Collection

Later, in her musings on photography, she riffs on the language of fairy tales to reflect on her work so far. “It is impossible ever after . . . to round off arguments neatly,” she said. When she wrote this text, she was a radical emerging artist, outspoken but unsure, and her metamorphosis was just beginning. Spence’s approach to art making was always one of obsession and excess, and she gathered and gathered research, never truly willing to streamline or minimize what she wanted to say. We can see the seedlings of this clearly in Fairy Tales and Photography, and that’s really the beauty of it. It was, in the end, a way of working she carried with her for the rest of her life.

Fairy Tales and Photography, or, another look at Cinderella was published by RRB Photobooks in 2020.

Opening Reception: Donavon Smallwood: 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

21 Jul 21 - 17:00
Baxter St Camera Club of New York
126 Baxter St
New York

Online Opening Reception: 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

8 Jul 21 - 17:00

Kikuji Kawada on the Traumas of History and the Skies above Japan

Kikuji Kawada is one of Japan’s most celebrated postwar photographers. In 1959, Kawada—along with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno—founded the influential VIVO cooperative, which championed an expressive approach to documentary photography. He is perhaps best known for his now-iconic 1965 book The Map (or Chizu in Japanese), a disquieting exploration of the trauma of World War II. The book, designed by Kohei Sugiura, features images of stains burnt into the walls of Hiroshima’s A-Bomb Dome (now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), as well as images related to the iconography of the American occupation. Kawada’s subsequent projects continued his interest in connecting the present with historical touchstones and shift between realism and abstraction; some observers have aptly described his work as a form of archaeology. Begun in the late 1960s, his project Los Caprichos (The caprices) was inspired by Goya etchings and features daily life in Tokyo, sometimes with a surrealist twist. Last Cosmology (1969–2000) focuses on the relationship between the terrestrial and the cosmic, capturing astronomical phenomena—solar eclipses, dramatic cloud formations, and the movements of the heavens—often above Tokyo.

Kawada, now eighty-two, continues to attract a wide international audience. His photographs were featured in the 2014 exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography, curated by Simon Baker, for London’s Tate Modern, and MACK books has recently released a volume of The Last Cosmology. For Aperture magazine’s 2015 issue, “Tokyo,” Kawada met with Ryuichi Kaneko, an influential historian and a major collector of Japanese photography books, at Tokyo’s Photo Gallery International. They discussed the arc of Kawada’s six-decade-long engagement with photography.

Kikuji Kawada, G.I. and a Woman at Ueno Park, 1953

Ryuichi Kaneko: I’d like to start by asking what made you become a photographer. What inspired your first forays into photography as an art?

Kikuji Kawada: People ask me all the time what made me decide to be a photographer, but I have to say, I’ve always found it hard to put my finger on it. It was more like one thing led to another, really. I got my first camera in high school. The first time I used it, I got on my bike and rode way out into the mountains, out where no one was around, and ended up taking pictures of some dry grass I found out there. Thinking back now, I have no idea why I did that.

I was born in a little town called Tsuchiura—really rural. You could get on your bike and end up in the mountains right away or wander around amid the rice fields.

Kaneko: Most people think of a camera, first and foremost, as a tool for taking pictures of those closest to them. But your first instinct was to go out where there weren’t any people at all.

Kawada: I liked doing things in secret—maybe not the healthiest predilection, now that I think about it [laughs]. I was interested in playing with mechanical things in secret; it felt like I was accessing the heart of the mechanism that way, its essence. Discovering its secrets.

Kikuji Kawada, Nude on Table, 1966, from the series Memoir, 1951–66

Kaneko: In the 1950s and ’60s you published frequently in photography magazines; Shincho Weekly, Nippon Camera, and Photo Art—those magazines were your mainstay. Looking back at the photographs you published early on— Yaizu and Fishing Port at Yaizu (1957–59), or The Bar Abandoned by the Boom (1957), or even, to a certain extent, the Base photographs (1953)—did these first run in Shincho Weekly?

Kawada: Many photographs were taken for magazines but didn’t end up published. They were too strange. Shincho Weekly wanted less edgy themes for the spreads— though some were things I shot on my own time, when inspiration struck. I would stop to shoot something on the way back from an assignment, for example.

Kaneko: [By the late 1950s] you’d become a member of the postwar generation of photographers, and your work was getting a fair amount of attention. But there’s one series I really must ask you about from this time: when you went to Hiroshima. That was with Domon, right? [Ken Domon, the influential documentary photographer of this period.]

Kawada: It was. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam over the years, but long story short: I proposed a trip to Hiroshima to the editorial board of Shincho Weekly, a documentary shoot, and it was approved. I was excited at the prospect of going, but it was decided that it would have to be a special issue, and in that case it should be Domon who went. That was an order from the top. So, my hopes were dashed in an instant. The people who ended up going were Domon and [freelance journalist] Daizo Kusayanagi. They were charged with gathering evidence under the auspices of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. It became a huge special issue. And Domon ended up going back and forth to Hiroshima many times during the process of shooting what would become the book Hiroshima (1958). The editor at Shincho was paying for these trips out of his own pocket, and at one point he said to me that he knew I’d been the one to propose the project but that I’d never gotten a chance to go, so he was going to send me along as an assistant. So, it was as Domon’s assistant that I ended up going. That was my first trip to Hiroshima.

Pages from the original maquette Chizu (The Map), 1965

Courtesy the Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

Kaneko: How many times did you end up going with him?

Kawada: Just once. Domon liked the finer things. He wanted to stay at the very best place in town, so we ended up in a new hotel and would walk to the Peace Park and the A-Bomb Dome, which were nearby. We would go together, but then I’d slip away and walk around on my own. And that’s when I found them: the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome that became the subject of the Stain series. I would just slip away, secretly, without a word to Domon.

Kaneko: So, there were rooms underground, beneath the dome?

Kawada: When the place was destroyed, there were about thirty people—I think it was around eight in the morning or so, but at any rate, in the morning—these people had arrived for work and ended up vaporized. The place had a horrible atmosphere. Just looking at it was overwhelming. And you couldn’t see very well; there were no lights, no electricity. So, I left and gathered up a big camera and some bulbs and headed back.

Kaneko: So, that’s how you first discovered that place?

Kawada: Yes. This was going to be my Hiroshima. I could take so many kinds of pictures there. This was no longer assistant’s work; I was preparing my own project. I wasn’t thinking about anything else.

Kaneko: You said you brought back a big camera. Do you mean a 4 by 5? And lights to illuminate the rooms?

Kawada: It was a 4 by 5, yes. But I didn’t use lights; I shot in natural light. Back then, we could go in and out of the dome as we liked. In the Tate Modern book [Conflict, Time Photography, 2014], there’s that famous photograph of Kiyoshi Kikkawa, who was called genbaku ichi-go [bomb victim number one]. He ran a souvenir stand right next to the dome.

Pages from the original maquette Chizu (The Map), 1965
Courtesy the Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

Kaneko: I’ve heard you talk before about discovering those “stains” beneath the dome, and when I think about how they may be all that was left of people who were vaporized in an instant, all the hair on my body stands on end. You hear about things like that: people explain what happened as carefully as they can—this happened, that happened, like that. But there’s no comparison to seeing it as one image. It has so much power.

Kawada: The hard part becomes how to organize that kind of material, how to convey its enormity.

Kaneko: You published some of those photographs in Nippon Camera under the title The Map: Stain. That was August 1962. Was that their debut?

Kawada: I think so. After the Eyes of Ten exhibition (1957), there was another show, NON, at the Matsuya Ginza Gallery (1962). I showed many of the Stain pictures there—about ten pieces in all, I think. That was the first time I’d put together a fair amount of them as one exhibition. Eikoh Hosoe debuted the first of his Ordeal by Roses photographs there, too. We had a lot of people coming to that show including Yukio Mishima, of course, since he was Hosoe’s model. I overheard him asking, “What kind of ‘stains’ are these? Stains left by what?” I was a bit contrary back then, you know. I said, “That’s for you to imagine, sir” [laughs]. Though I did think you should be able to tell just by looking.

Kaneko: When looking through The Map, the first thing that makes an impression is of course the A-Bomb Dome photographs—the Stain photos—and then the other images of what you might call “scars of war.” But there are other images, too, like the spiral lathe left for scrap in a factory or a wanted poster related to a heinous crime, or a bank of television screens— all sorts of images. So, history is brought into direct contact with the present.

Kawada: An image taken of the “present,” whenever that is, is so strong—vivid in hue, aspect, substance—because it’s a document. I seek even now to explore new forms for documentary to take. When you layer things in the way we’ve been discussing, the layers produce meaning, metaphors emerge as you go deeper into the juxtapositions that arise, and the ways of seeing the image multiply. Not because it’s a collage, because you have layers, like this [indicates the accordion shape of a camera bellows].

Kikuji Kawada, Die Ganze Stadt 2 (The entire city 2), Hale Bopp Comet, Tokyo, 1987, from the series Last Cosmology

Kaneko: I understand that when it came time to actually make the book, there were a lot of complications on the road from the dummy version to its final form. You were unable to put it out as you first envisioned it, in two volumes, and instead everything had to be layered physically into one volume.

Kawada: That was the plan proposed by our fantastic designer, Kohei Sugiura—to split The Map in two. On the one hand, there were the Stain photographs; they added up to a good proportion of the whole. Then there were the other photographs, the Hinomaru flag photograph, the monuments, the more symbolic stuff. We split these photographs into two volumes—half in one, half in the other—and we’d put them in one case. So, the viewer would have to take them out and look at one volume, then open the other. So, it was only in their heads that the whole “map” ever existed. It was so creative, this idea. But I thought it was too hard to understand. Someone buying the thing would have to realize that he has to look at one volume and then another just to figure out what’s going on. It’s too much trouble.

Anyway, to skip to the end of the story, it was decided that the thing was too big—it would be too expensive—so we had to make it smaller. To make it smaller, we decided it should fold out on every page—Kannon-style [referring to the Buddhist goddess of mercy], they call it, with the hinged doors. Sugiura asked how many pages we should make that way. I thought, if we go that way, we should go all the way. With a triptych, when you fold the sides over a central image, what’s hidden becomes a sacred icon. That’s the meaning of that design—exactly what the Japanese term means, like opening an altar to view an image of Kannon. So, we redesigned every page that way, and it took about a year or so to do it.

Kaneko: The Map came out in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, and it was talked about quite a bit. Though, I gather it didn’t sell that well?

Kawada: I was afraid it might be passed over entirely, so I took a copy to each publication that ran real criticism. I took the book physically to their offices, right to the writers. I remember one guy, Hiroshi Iwada, the poet. He wrote something in the newspaper Nihon Dokusho Shimbun. And then there was Tatsuhiko Shibusawa [a novelist and critic]; I got him to write something somewhere, too. So, word trickled out like that, and as far as critical opinion was concerned, people thought it was a pretty great thing.

Kikuji Kawada, The Last Golden Ring Eclipse in Japan, Okinawa, 1987, from the series Last Cosmology

Kaneko: You called the work you did before The Map “symbolic documentary,” Ikko Narahara’s Human Land photographs were eventually called a “personal document,” and Eikoh Hosoe called Kamaitachi a “memory document.” Shomei Tomatsu never used the term, but in the end, it seemed to me that this generation of photographers considered all photography to be “documentary.”

Kawada: We had no strong consciousness of it. I mean, we never debated things in those terms, but I know what you’re saying. Now that I hear you say it, I can’t help but think, Yes, that’s exactly it!

Kaneko: But it wasn’t something you thought about while shooting the photographs. After some time has passed and a bit of perspective is gained, that’s when words begin to emerge. When I try to conceptualize your work as a whole, Los Caprichos becomes key. These photographs were unlike anything that had come before. At first, I was extremely drawn to the work as street photography—the way these photographs seemed to represent a whole new approach to the snapshot. That’s how I thought of them at first, but then, there were suddenly all these clouds. And I thought, What is going on?

Kawada: Well, I devoted my attention to that series for seven years, so all sorts of things are bound to end up in it. So, clouds or whatever, I wanted to absorb everything and then give it shape. Then I moved on to Last Cosmology and more clouds. I shot all sorts of clouds. In truth, I’m still shooting them—violent, chaotic clouds. I’m drawn to things that change, that constantly transform.

Kikuji Kawada, The Setting Sun to Triangular, Tokyo, 1989, from the series Last Cosmology

Kikuji Kawada, Artificial Moon Trail, Tokyo, 1989, from the series Last Cosmology

Kaneko: This seems different from how you spoke earlier about finding the stains on the wall beneath the A-Bomb Dome and deciding to shoot them—photographing clouds until something emerges from them.

Kawada: Absolutely. It is totally different. Clouds are always changing shape, just as the world itself does. But the A-Bomb Dome? That’s a stain that remains the same; no more will emerge. At a certain point in time, the place was destroyed and it became a ruin. A cloud’s freshness lies in how it’s always becoming something new. That’s the difference. We are a race of seafarers living in an island country, and so for many of us the tides of our hearts move with the tides of the sea. We live enclosed within the sea and the sky. I don’t mean that in an idyllic way; I mean that the face of the world can be found in the changing faces of the sea and the sky, and I’m trying to capture that.

Kaneko: As you gathered the material together to make Last Cosmology, was that a title you used to try to organize these new images, these pictures of heavenly bodies and clouds?

Kawada: Well, at the time, images conjured by words were extremely important to me— the images I saw while reading Gaston Bachelard’s L’air et les songes [Air and Dreams, 1943]. That’s what I had in my head—not the words themselves but the images they conjured. My first title—well, I discarded Dreams—it became just Sky. And then the next series was Clouds. I spent ten years or so on this. The millennium was approaching and the Showa period was reaching its end [with the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989]. The last annular solar eclipse visible in Showa Japan seemed like a strong image to add to those I’d been collecting. It became a “last” image. But Last Cosmos doesn’t really work, so I made it Last Cosmology. The world of photography had never really produced a cosmology, but in the world of letters, there have been famous histories of the universe and the like, so I borrowed that idea. And that’s how Last Cosmology came about.

Kaneko: And all the while, you kept taking pictures of clouds—other things, too, pictures of the sun, the moon, of Halley’s Comet. Though, these weren’t taken with a regular camera: you used a camera affixed to a telescope to make many of these images. What made you decide to use that kind of specialized equipment?

Kawada: As the themes in my work change, it’s only natural that the mechanisms I use change, too, right? The images I began to want to make, the images that moved me, I couldn’t capture them with a regular camera. I would look through astronomy magazines and be struck by the fact that I would have to use astronomical telescopes and mobile lenses.

Kikuji Kawada, Helio-spot and a Helicopter, Tokyo, 1990, from the series Last Cosmology
All photos © Kikuji Kawada and courtesy Photo Gallery International, Tokyo

Kaneko: When you do that sort of thing, it seems like there’s a paper-thin line between you and a hobbyist looking up in the sky through a telescope and taking photographs. Yet your photographs do seem completely distinctive. Did you think about that as you took them?

Kawada: There is that danger, sure. The danger that if I kept shooting like this, all I’d end up with would be run-of-the-mill astronomy photographs. But, you know, I remained conscious of what was happening on the ground. That’s what saved it, I think. I gave a lecture once and someone asked, “What should I do when I go on a shoot?” Just take photographs, I answered, but [Eikoh] Hosoe—he was there, too—he said something to the effect that it wasn’t enough to just take photographs. He said you had to be searching for something as you shoot [laughs].

Deciding on a theme at the start of a project is an old-fashioned approach, I think. Though I’ve done it plenty of times myself. Later on, I wouldn’t know myself where a project was going; it might split into different projects for all I knew. But if I did it right, it would become something major. Of that I was always sure.

This article and photographs were originally published in Aperture, issue 219, “Tokyo.” Interview translated by Brian Bergstrom.

Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs Announce the Creator Labs Photo Fund

Today, Google’s Creator Labs and Aperture announce the launch of the Creator Labs Photo Fund—a new initiative providing financial support to artists in the wake of COVID-19. 

The fund, made possible by Google Devices and Services in partnership with Aperture, will be distributed through a national open call, starting July 1 and running through July 16, 2021. Submissions will be free and open to any photographer or lens-based artist living in the United States, and twenty selected artists will be awarded a prize of $5,000 each. 

With artists and creatives heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has never been more important and vital to provide support for this community. 

Aperture serves as an essential platform for artists, fostering critical dialogue within the photographic community — in print, in person, and online. “We are thrilled to partner with Google on the Creator Labs Photo Fund,” says Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin, “and we hope that together we can contribute to sustaining the future of photography. We all communicate with images today: we want to encourage photographers to keep working toward a more rigorous, more expansive range of expressions to the field.”

To apply to the Creator Labs Photo Fund, all entrants will need to submit 8 to 10 images from one body of work, showing a commitment to making a cohesive and compelling series or project. The project does not need to be finished. Entrants will not be evaluated on the basis of prior experience, publications, or exhibition history, but instead on the strength and originality of their visions.

Submit now to the the Creator Labs Photo Fund, open from July 1–July 16, 2021.

William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s

In 1999, when I was an intern at the now-defunct photography and literature quarterly DoubleTake, housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, I was asked to proofread a survey of photographs by William Gedney. The revered but little-known artist had died a decade earlier. Since no books on his work had been published in his lifetime, What Was True: The Photographs of William Gedney, coedited by Margaret Sartor and Geoff Dyer, would be an introduction for most readers. It most certainly was for me. I was struck by the intimacy of Gedney’s photographs, the accidentally graceful human arrangements in his black-and-white frames: barefoot, stringy-haired girls loitering in a kitchen near a Kentucky mining camp in the 1960s; a young boy gripping the steering wheel of a stalled car; teenage boys and men gathered, shirtless, around the flipped-up hood of another broken-down car. Gedney’s pictures were both secretive and familiar. They spoke to the way I had felt watching grown-ups talk on my grandparents’ small mountain farm, when they thought us kids weren’t really paying attention. Gedney’s pictures let people reveal a hidden part of themselves in a way that other photographs I’d encountered of country people and poor people did not. He saw them with complicated beauty, without condescension. The people in his frames could, and did, desire and dream of worlds and existences beyond what was expected and assumed of them. In recognizing that quality, the photographer simultaneously revealed something of his own longing.

Gedney worked this way, whether photographing young seekers dropping out of life and making their way to San Francisco in the sixties, or people on the streets of India in the early seventies, or the regulars in a dingy, raucous bar in his Brooklyn neighborhood—which, many years later, would become mine too. Even his photographs of cars parked on empty streets and lonesome dark yards at night reflect human feeling. Just as palpable as the melancholy that pervades his pictures is a sense of camaraderie, a physical freedom among people nonetheless simultaneously harboring deep and private worries. The bonds between them showed in a dozen subtle, alluring ways, and Gedney captured them in multitudes, sometimes within a single frame.

William Gale Gedney was born in 1932 in Albany and grew up in rural upstate New York. At nineteen he enrolled at Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, where he discovered what he would call “a natural feeling for photography.” In order to make his photographs on his own terms, Gedney lived frugally. For years, he made do in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, not far from Pratt, filled with books and music and his steadily growing, meticulously organized archives. His degree was in graphic design and he picked up paying work at Time-Life Books and Condé Nast Publications; later, he taught at Pratt and Cooper Union, working jobs that were either temporary or that he’d quit when he saved enough money.

According to his friends, Gedney had a loud, bellowing laugh. To his friend and onetime lover writer Joseph Caldwell, Gedney jokingly claimed to be descended from “reindeer thieves.” About his photographs, though, he was absolutely serious. Maria Friedlander has written that Gedney had “often expressed his feeling that to be a truly committed artist one had to be free to pursue one’s work.” He was a “loner, very private,” she wrote. At least in certain circles, he kept his love life closely guarded, in a secret realm. Once, when she asked him if he wanted to get married, if he’d ever had a close girlfriend, he answered with that same bellowing laugh, one that Friedlander came to understand meant that she had “come upon a gate that he kept firmly closed.” In his 2019 memoir, In the Shadow of the Bridge, Caldwell recalls meeting Gedney in 1959 as they passed each other on the Brooklyn Bridge (the subject of a series Gedney was working on). They soon began an affair and exchanged apartment keys, but this relationship eventually dissolved as Gedney became consumed again with his art. When they reconnected again as friends in the mid-1980s, Gedney was visibly ill, covered in lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma. He was living in the first and only house he owned, a fixer-upper on Staten Island where, under his care, a grape arbor, a cherry tree, and a vegetable garden flourished. He had also “semi-adopted” a German shepherd mix he named Mr. Dog. Caldwell, who had been volunteering support for patients through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, would move in as caretaker. He was at Gedney’s side when he died at fifty-six years old.

In another world, one in which Gedney was allowed to live longer, or was exhibited more frequently, his name likely would be widely mentioned today alongside those who championed his work. This would include Walker Evans, who recommended Gedney for his Guggenheim grant in 1966; his friend Diane Arbus, who encouraged him to take over the teaching of her classes at Cooper Union; John Szarkowski, who gave him a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, which the curator described as a study of “people living precariously, under difficulty”; and Lee Friedlander, who with his wife, Maria, remained close to Gedney throughout his life. The Friedlanders were among those who helped arrange for the acquisition of Gedney’s archives by the special collections library at Duke University, including thousands of finished prints and seven handmade maquettes of the books Gedney never published in his lifetime.

“They seem to be doing happy things sadly, or maybe they’re doing sad things happily.” This enigmatic remark by John Cage, a friend of the photographer, is one of only two brief texts that William Gedney included in an unpublished maquette that he titled A Time of Youth. Photographed in San Francisco over the course of ninety-nine days, from October 1966 to early 1967, the series is a witness to a time before a time—the preamble to the Summer of Love, transitory and searching, and refreshingly devoid of any grooviness or flower-power tropes that would later be implanted in collective memory. A Time of Youth: San Francisco 1966–1967, published in February fifty-some years since its inception, marks the first book devoted to a single, complete project by the photographer. About half the book is devoted to supplementary texts—pages from Gedney’s letters and journals, and in-depth essays by critic Philip Gefter and the book’s editor, Lisa McCarty. But at the core is Gedney’s maquette of eighty-nine images, revealing him as a prescient creator of the modern, lyrical photobook, which he saw as a unique literary genre. “I worked for the collective impression,” Gedney wrote in April 1969, “yet tried to make each of the individual pictures stand on their own.” He envisioned the photographs as elements in a story and sequenced them so that they progressed from morning to night—effectively collapsing his eighty-nine days into a semi-fictional twenty-four hours. In this way, he was as ahead of his time artistically as the young dropouts and hippies who had arrived on the cusp of the counterculture. A Time of Youth offers the first opportunity to see his long-form work close to the way he conceived of it—as a dramatic narrative formed almost entirely by the pictures.

“In another world, one in which Gedney was allowed to live longer, or was exhibited more frequently, his name likely would be widely mentioned today alongside those who championed his work.”

McCarty writes that, although she added essays and contextual materials, she otherwise tried to hew to the specifications in Gedney’s notes, including the book’s sequence. She enlarged the dimensions slightly (the book measures nine by nine inches; Gedney desired eight by eight). Compared to his luminous Kentucky photographs, the San Francisco work tends to be darker in emotional tenor and denser in tonality, with semi-obscured figures and downturned, daydreaming faces. A Time of Youth feels kindred to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s landmark essay depicting the grimmer, disillusioned side of Haight-Ashbury, as if Gedney and Didion had stepped inside the same living rooms. Both were a generation older than the young people they photographed and wrote about (Gedney was born two years before Didion). Both must have had a way of making themselves invisible in these spaces. A fragment from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” could well be transposed as a Gedney caption:

It is three o’clock and Deadeye is in bed. Somebody else is asleep on the living room couch and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked.

But Gedney’s pictures didn’t require words (nor did Didion’s essay require pictures). In his notebooks, Gedney characterized A Time of Youth as “an attempt at visual literature, modeled after the novel form.” The narrative of the book unfolds entirely through the photographs, with recurring characters that evolve and are changed, even if their transformations are not outwardly, explicitly revealed.

Organized in seven movements, the book’s structure is also inherently musical, influenced by Gedney’s avid appreciation for twentieth-century composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Roger Sessions, and especially Charles Ives. Music becomes a motif: the recurring appearance of the guitar in the first movement, a wooden recorder in the next. We wake up inside a crowded communal room, with two shadowy, androgynous-looking people, lying on the floor in a rumpled blanket, one cradling the other’s face as he reaches idly for a guitar propped in the corner.

“Youth restlessly lounging over parked cars, in doorways, against store windows, garbage cans, parking meters, trees, each other,” Gedney writes in his notebook. We are drawn to the infinite and unconscious arrangements of bodies, curled up against each other but gazing outward and away; bodies sleeping under tables; hands snaking around waists, kissing, hugging, hands clasping hands; or of clusters of bodies, drinking tea on mattresses in front of portraits of Jean Harlow and Marlon Brando, or playing guitar in stairwells and slouching on stoops. Many of the pictures were made inside a communal house called “the Pad,” near the Grateful Dead’s house. And the concluding sequence of the book takes place at a Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park. Twenty thousand people showed up but Gedney sought out individuals: a couple lying on the grass in deep conversation, a boy draped in beads staring defiantly at the camera, and another, eyes downcast, holding himself tightly close. In the final image, a lone man in the foreground hunches his shoulders, looking on as blurred figures wander off into the fog. With his hair cut short and in a dress shirt, the observer is an outsider in this world, a proxy for the photographer himself.

All images from the book A Time of Youth: San Francisco 1966–1967 (2021)
© William Gedney, William Gedney Photographs and Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

In the last months of Gedney’s life, Joseph Caldwell recalls in his memoir, he only occasionally mentioned the books that came close to publication but were never realized—a deluxe edition of his India work, a book of his series of portraits of composers. “Could he have become so discouraged by these disappointments that he suffered a photographer’s version of writer’s block?” Caldwell writes. And yet: “Even though he had no instinct for self-promotion, he did have—I don’t doubt—a sure sense of his own worth and the artistic value of the work he’d done.”                                                

The overdue arrival of this Gedney book is also a testament to the artist’s faith in the longevity of his work and the degree of sacrifice he undertook to protect it. Often, I walk past Gedney’s old apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and look up at the window from which he made a daily series of the same photograph of the view outside: the elevated train that ran along Myrtle Avenue in those years, the shops and street below, and I think of the long, cold winters he spent working there, of his pictures of the street blanketed in snow.

A Time of Youth: San Francisco 1966–1967 was published by Duke University Press in 2021.

Family Fun Day at Fotografiska NY

17 Oct 21 - 10:00
Fotografiska NY
281 Park Ave S
New York

Family Fun Days at Fotografiska NY

19 Sep 21 - 10:00
Fotografiska NY
281 Park Ave S
New York

Book Signing with Tim Davis at Outside Space NYC

22 Jul 21 - 18:00
Outside Space NYC
216 Classon Ave
Brooklyn

Tim Davis Book Signing at Artbook in Los Angeles

10 Jul 21 - 15:00
Artbook at Hauser & Wirth
917 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles