WHAT WAS TRUE CL

An extraordinary and stirring collection of photographs and writings by an enigmatic photographer whose work is published here for the first time. William Gedney died in 1989 at the age of fifty-six. He left behind a lifetime of photographic work, most of it unknown outside of a few colleagues and curators, including John Szarkowski, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus. 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 whom, 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. A retrospective exhibition of William Gedney's works opens in December 1999 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.