Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney - Part Two

I had the good fortune of having coffee with Margaret Sartor back in June at the Nasher Museum on the campus of Duke University. She generously agreed to meet with me and talk about the work of William Gedney and her experience researching it for her book, co-edited by Geoff Dyer, What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. Sartor is a photographer, writer, and teacher at Duke University and has curated exhibitions of photography at the International Center for Photography in New York, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

One of the most pressing questions I've had about Gedney's work in Appalachia has simply been, why? Why Appalachia? I'm fascinated by his choice to leave New York and wander into eastern Kentucky to make photographs. I asked Sartor about this. She explained that he was very close to his grandparents, who were farmers in upstate New York. Some of his earliest photographic work was centered on his grandparents and it’s likely that his connection to them - the life they led, the simplicity of the land, the beauty of place, ultimately drew him to Kentucky.

To Sartor, Gedney was very interested in the authenticity of people and place. He had very little patience for inauthenticity or pretension (artistic or otherwise). He worked very unobtrusively, rarely confronting his subjects head on or imposing himself upon the situation.

"We can't pinpoint why we keep looking at an image but if we keep coming back, you know that it's something beyond the surface, you know, that somehow in describing the surface, the photographer has managed to get at something deeper...and really invisible." - Margaret Sartor

We talked about the photograph above, simply titled Young girl. Next to Three girls in kitchen, this is my favorite William Gedney photograph. There is so much here. The girl's head slightly tilted back and to the side, wisps of hair in her hace, her set jaw, arms crossed, and those eyes. Her gaze speaks volumes to me. Sartor and I spoke at length about this photograph.

"Her defiance is something we recognize (perhaps as adolescents) - it's a spirit. It's something much more lively than self-conscious. She's showing a side of herself to Gedney, yet not letting him in. As photographers, we've been on both sides of the camera. We work hard to try to get at who the person really is. Gedney had a special way of capturing that electricity - how the subject and photographer work it out. It's interesting that he got that from her (that she presented it to him) and that he would see that part of her spirit and not be looking for something else." - Margaret Sartor

Gedney's Appalachia work is refreshing to me because it feels so incredibly real. Sartor noted that, "We keep looking because it (Gedney's work) feels so genuine." I couldn't agree more. His unassuming presence allowed him to capture moments so obviously absent from most of the work I've seen from Appalachia, that one has to wonder why so few photographs like this exist. Certainly at the time he was photographing in Appalachia, there was a stream of imagery coming out of there that I feel shaped the way we look at Appalachia today. For me, Gedney chose to see and show the deeper humanity of my home. How he saw the world, my world, challenges me to be truer, to be more authentic when I work.

Following are more of my selections from the Gedney collection that, for me, show the depth of the sort of quiet poetry he seemed to be working out (another great insight from Margaret Sartor).

All photographs - William Gedney Collection, Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney - Part One

Editor's Note: This is the first in a new series of posts called "Looking at Appalachia." My goal is to feature exchanges with photographers from Appalachia,  or who have done long form projects in Appalachia, or both. I dedicate this entire series to the life, work, and spirit of William Gedney.

This is the first William Gedney photograph I remember seeing. He made this picture of Junior Cornett in 1972 in Leatherwood, Kentucky on his second, and last, trip there. I remember seeing this picture and being reminded of my grandfather, Cecil May (also from eastern Kentucky). Perhaps it was his hair and the way he held his cigarette. From that moment, I've been ineffably connected to Gedney's work. Visually, his photographs offer me what Wendell Berry's words do.

I'm fascinated by Gedney's eastern Kentucky photographs. Try as I may, I haven't been able to figure out why he chose Appalachia to make photographs, but I'm so very glad he did. I've spent hours reading his notebooks, poring over his photographs and prints and nowhere can I find the reason that led him to Perry County, Kentucky. In the early 1960's, Appalachia saw a flood of photographers, news crews, and filmmakers (think Charles Kuralt's Christmas in Appalachia circa 1964) come into the hills and hollers as part of the War on Poverty campaign. By and large, they formed a disparaging visual narrative of the place I was born and raised. Yet somehow, William Gedney transcended that tendency and instead made photographs of grace, beauty, and simple existence all the while capturing the hardscrabble environs of his subjects. There must've been something about his spirit that caused him to see what others did not, would not, perhaps could not.

William Gedney died on June 23, 1989 at 56. In his lifetime, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for photography (1966-67), a Fulbright Fellowship for photography in India (1969-71), a National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography (1975-76), and several other grants and fellowships. He had a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1968-69) as well as more than a dozen other exhibitions. What surprised me about this is that Gedney never published a book. Four years after his death, in 1993, Duke University became the repository for 51.3 linear feet of Gedney's work. Margaret Sartor, a photographer, writer, and teacher at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, was approached by the library and asked to put together an exhibit of Gedney's work. In 2000, Sartor and Geoff Dyer coedited What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. The book quickly sold out and today you can find a used copy for around $150.

With permission from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, I'll be sharing some of my selections of Gedney's work in the next few posts in this series. There are thousands more of his images available online here. Gedney made only two trips to Kentucky, one in 1964 and another in 1972, spending a total of 29 days there. He quickly became a part of the Cornett family and worked amongst them with a meticulous, quiet familiarity shown in the photographs below. Referring to the "extended study" of the Cornett's, Sartor writes:

"As in the lives of so many photographers - Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt among them - a specific time and place can sometimes generate an extraordinary (and usually brief) concentration of perception, and an energy that pushes work to its highest level. So Gedney's photographs of Willie, Vivian, and their children, altogether the yield of one short month, are the most thoroughly original of his thirty-year career."

All black and white images (7) - William Gedney Collection, Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

In the next post, I'll share some of my conversation with Margaret Sartor, coeditor of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney as well as more of Gedney's work.