After the exhibition Notes sur l’asphalte, une Amérique mobile et précaire last February, the Pavilion Populaire in Montpellier continues its season devoted to American photography with an exhibition entitled William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955-1984, from June 28th to September 17th 2017.
Without doubt, William Gedney (1932-1989) is one of the most mysterious and least well-known of the generation of American photographers who came to maturity in the years from 1960 to 1980. A situation that can doubtlessly be explained by a determined absence of self-promotion and a certain circumspection.During his lifetime Gedney only had one exhibition, cut back to 42 prints, at New York’s prestigious MoMA. There was no meaningful published work of his pictures during his career.
This full retrospective devoted to an artist whose work is as unknown in Europe as it is in the United States, was produced from William Gedney’s archives, left to the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Photographs taken in India and Kentucky, along with photo-reports of gay parades in the 1980s, and documentation of the hippie movements in San Francisco. William Gedney was as adept at street photography as of taking pictures of bodies and faces.
The exhibition, comprising two hundred and eight photographs, is representative of the American’s high standards. Gilles Mora, the exhibition’s curator and the Pavilion Populaire’s artistic director, explains, “a Gedney ‘method’ exists, a characteristic way of positioning oneself in front of reality, the substance on which any documentary photographer depends.You can use the word ‘immersion’, in a way that implies a strong connivance between the operator and his subject, to a degree of intimacy that few photographers would envisage these days. His stylistic tool is that of documentary photography, direct, black and white, small format, never tempted by anything other than an unaffected, but more and more effective, vision, of reality. That which many operators practised before his time, and in his time, under the sign of ‘street photography’, applied to a photographic territory defined, from the end of the 1930s, by American society, in the sense of being the broadest, but also, for Gedney, India, Europe and intellectual , and even sexual, affinities. Only the Lonely, the title of a 1960 American rock classic, perfectly illustrates William Gedney’s secretive personality and fiercely protected solitude. His work is a masterpiece for its quality, its technique, its sensitivity, even its sensuality, close to some of his contemporaries, his friend Diane Arbus or Robert Frank, but with a unique vision.”
An autodidact, convinced that photography constituted as effective a means of expression as literature (many writings, journals, critiques, aphorisms accompanying his works), Gedney, a superb photographer of mankind, was also drawn to rural subjects his work on Kentucky at the end of the 1950s is a good example and urban too: New York, where he lived most often, offered a unique scope, as it did to many photographers of his generation. Tempted by night photography, becoming attached to the diffuse sensuality that he found in his adolescent subjects, Gedney built for himself an all but spectacular style, often marked by his intimate connection with the world, driven more and more by his hidden homosexuality, which was only revealed at the time of his death: he was one of the first AIDS victims .
William Gedney : Only the Lonely, 1955-1984
From 28th June to 17th September 2017
Pavillon Populaire
121 Allée de Jerusalem
34000 Montpellier
France
