Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

A few days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, William Gedney spent the evening in his book-crowded Brooklyn apartment, poring over a copy of E. J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits. Bellocq had made these photos in about 1912 and for almost half a century they were forgotten. Then, in 1958, Gedney’s friend Lee Friedlander came across the glass-plate negatives. In 1970 he exhibited a selection of the prints he had made from them, in the hope that Bellocq’s name could be inserted retrospectively into the photographic pantheon. When Gedney saw them, he found himself entranced by these images made by a man who had come to exist exclusively in terms of what he saw, a man who had disappeared from history, whose work had been so fortuitously rescued from oblivion by Friedlander.

Storyville Portraits contains just over a third of Bellocq’s eighty-nine surviving pictures, which Gedney had first seen at Friedlander’s house. As he looked at them again on that “depressing day” in the fall of 1971, he was struck by “how, in just thirty-four pictures, so complete a world is rendered, an all-encompassing wholeness. Each one of his photographs seems to contain the germ of all his work. If only one of his pictures existed… you would still sense he was a great photographer.”

Although Bellocq abided by the photographic conventions of his time, Gedney thought there was a “subtle but telling difference that [made] him a great artist.” The same girl, it seemed to Gedney, could be posed in the same way, in the same setting in front of the same camera and photographed by a hundred different photographers, “and each would come up with a slightly different picture. But I wonder, would any come up with a picture better than the rest? If Bellocq was one of those photographers, I believe he would. It is a continuously amazing thing that this impersonal machine, the camera, should render not only the surface of the visible world, but is capable of rendering so sensitively the personality of the photographer.”

Gedney attempted to develop these ideas over several more pages of his notebook until, amid much crossing out, his thoughts gave way to unconnected jottings. After copying out a passage from W. H. Auden that took his fancy, he conceded, “Have not been able to finish writing on Bellocq.”

The notebook in which he sketched these ideas on Bellocq was made by Gedney himself: part of his program of intensely private, creative self-sufficiency. Several of these homemade notebooks are filled with notes on how to make notebooks, a task he liked because of its exactness: the precision, the sharp angles. It pleased him also to learn that certain cities in ancient Egypt had been arranged along the lines of a grid, a street plan of rectangles. In 1985 he copied out a passage from a book by Nan Fairbrother that elevated this personal preference to the level of a universal template: “The shapes we make for ourselves are geometrical, and the background of civilised life is more or less rectangular. Our rooms and houses are arrangements of cubes, our doors and windows, furniture and rugs, books and boxes—all their angles are right angles and all their sides are straight.”

He filled little notebooks with lists of books that he needed to read or buy. Then he filled larger notebooks with passages that he liked from the books he had acquired and read. Like an ascetic cleric in the Dark Ages, he transcribed other people’s words, making them his own, customizing them, on occasion, to render them more appropriate to his own situation. “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience,” wrote Joyce. Gedney marked that with an asterisk and inverted the terms—“the experience of reality”—to distinguish the photographer’s quest from the novelist’s.

He also transcribed his own notes, transferring the scrawled entries—the negatives, let’s say—from little store-bought notebooks and, by analogy, printing them up in his definitive, homemade ones.

A cliché: he read avidly. Everything he could. Spotting someone reading a book on unfamiliar, offbeat subjects people sometimes ask, “Why are you interested in that?” To which, for an autodidact like Gedney, there was only one reply: because it is interesting. He amassed and hoarded knowledge and then, if something caught his eye—a potential photograph—he would bring to bear on that instant or incident everything he had learned and read. It didn’t stop there, though, because his ideal of self-sufficiency was underwritten, naturally, by self-generating curiosity. The more he saw, the more he wanted to learn. The more he learned, the more he saw. It wasn’t enough to train himself to see; he had also to understand what he saw, to become more articulate in the language of sight.

Coleridge, it is often claimed, was the last person to have read everything. This voracious appetite for reading was matched, in his writing, by a chronic inability to finish anything. Walter Benjamin, an obsessive collector of books, thought that the most satisfying way to acquire volumes was to write them yourself, but he, too, was able to bring only a few of his most cherished projects to anything like completion. It is a trait they share with Gedney.

Although he reproached himself, on occasion, for not making the best use of his time, this inability to bring any of his varied projects to completion was the result not of laziness but, paradoxically, of immersing himself so thoroughly in his work. Early on he acquired Marguerite Yourcenar’s wisdom, that everything undertaken for its own sake is worthwhile—irrespective of the outcome. He lived out the ideal of the artist who produces—who works—for his or her own sake; more exactly, for the sake of the task itself. And his ability to do this was unaffected, perhaps even facilitated, by his apparent lack of success. A selection of photographs from Kentucky and San Francisco was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969, but Gedney appears to have felt little or no impulse to capitalize on this early recognition of his work. After the critic John Canady had commented favorably on these photographs in the New York Times, in March 1969, Gedney wrote that “compliments even from someone you admire (most are from fools and not meant) warm you for about one minute and then mean nothing. The work in progress is the only thing that matters.” Ideally, his self-sufficiency would extend even to doing without the praise of others.

It is difficult not to make a connection between, on the one hand, Gedney’s obsessive urge to collect and accumulate—books, materials—and his reluctance to share his life with anyone else and, on the other hand, his inability finally to let go, to share his work with the world. He kept trying to refine his work down—selecting and rejecting, rejecting what he had selected—but could never edit it down quite enough. No finished form could do justice to what he had in mind. To complete was to compromise. Always the archivist’s urge to curate and catalog overcame the editor’s obligation to dispense with and discard. And so he went on accumulating. Effectively, he became the sole collector of his own work, thereby completing the circle of artistic self-sufficiency.

Probably the irony of his dying of AIDS was not lost on him. He amassed and amassed and amassed—and then fell prey to a disease that, little by little, pilfered away his immune system, a volume at a time, until there was nothing left: a new mutation of the classic, the perpetual destiny of the miser.

Except that is not the whole story, of course. He gave himself utterly, freely, to the nocturnal world of gay clubs and casual encounters. He even penned an unfinished account of one such experience, titling it—somewhat optimistically: it was only two pages long!—“A novel of degeneracy.” What they shared, the autodidact who lived reserved, austere, and the “degenerate” sexual adventurer, was a love of—and need for—anonymity, darkness, obscurity. This was a major theme in his work: people living out their lives in obscurity.

One day, after making a characteristically scrupulous study of Lewis Hine’s prints in a library, Gedney came across some pictures by a Brooklyn photographer whose name meant nothing to him. The photos were “of no aesthetic interest, taken only for documentary reasons,” but they made Gedney reflect that “it is not easy to be unpretentious, simple, direct, honest and yet intelligent.”

There were precedents, however. Most obviously, Eugène Atget, who, after hearing Man Ray praise his photos of Paris streets, responded that he only provided what the sign above his atelier modestly claimed: “Documents for artists.” Devoting himself to the task of preserving a Paris that was in danger of disappearing, living as un anonyme, insisting that he was “an amateur,” Atget only consented to his pictures’ being published on condition that his name was not used.

Closer to home, there was the artist Francis Guy. Gedney was so taken by Walt Whitman’s speculative account of Guy’s method of working on “Snow Scene in Brooklyn” that he copied it out in his notebooks:

A position and direction were fixed upon, looking out of a window if possible, and when the place to be pictured was well conned and determined Guy would construct a large rough frame and fix it in the window, or in such a position that it enclosed in its view whatever he wished to portray—and outside of the frame all was shut off and darkened.… This picture of Guy’s, we believe, was thus a literal portrait of the scene as it appeared from his window.

Virtually a photograph, in fact: a photograph not unlike Gedney’s own picture of the Myrtle Avenue El in the midst of a swirling snowstorm. He made many pictures of that view at different times of the year, always of the same scene, with the same lens, from exactly the same window—his own—at 467 Myrtle Avenue.

Gedney was fascinated by the history of his street and spent long hours in the local library, excavating its past, transcribing quotations, and pasting newspaper accounts of significant events of the street’s history into what he designated his “Myrtle Avenue Notebooks.” Whitman—whose grave Gedney photographed—had also lived on the avenue for a while, and the paper he had edited for several years, the Eagle, boasted that this first paved and graded street in the area was “the pride of the old-time Brooklynite.” That was in 1882; by 1939 Henry Miller considered it “a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness.” In the Myrtle Avenue Notebooks, Gedney uses these two quotations as terminuses between which he shuttles back and forth, preserving the history (through newspaper cuttings) of the street whose contemporary life he was recording in his photographs. To that extent the Myrtle Avenue Notebooks are the record of a homely, straightforward enterprise.

But they are also like sketches of a grandiose project of retrieval and meditation. Passages culled from books Gedney had read transform Myrtle Avenue into a discursive thoroughfare: a place where the idea of the street is contested. There is also an implicit traffic between the photographs he made of Myrtle Avenue and the verbal ambitions set down in the notebooks. The pictures are redefined by and feed back into the larger theoretical or conceptual idea of the street that is being developed through the quotations copied or pasted into the notebooks. “There must be eyes upon the street,” wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers, to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.” What the street needed above all, according to Jacobs, was “effective eyes.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the novelty of what is going on here: a photographer in the classical American tradition, steeped in the swirling legacy of modernity, conceives a postmodern text, and executes it, in his best schoolboy handwriting, in little notebooks of his own making, in 1969.

Gedney often found that other people’s words served him better than his own, but he continued, throughout his life, to try to coax and twist his own view of the world into his own words. His spelling was inventive, to say the least, his grammar frequently wayward, but his fascination with language and its capacity for generating—and hindering—insight is everywhere apparent. After Diane Arbus’s suicide, for example, he remembered her as a “rare species of bird loaded down with that bulky green canvas bag hung over one shoulder, pulling her body to one side and a camera with attached flash strung around her neck, constantly persistent in pursuit. A small being physically, always weighted down by her equipment, the necessary burden.” The fleeting impressions he was able to sketch verbally, with difficulty, he could fix, unerringly, in a photograph. Almost always, though, his photographs are informed by an active and ambitious literary sensibility. “I am attempting a literary form in visual terms” was how he summed up one of his extended photographic projects.

If not exactly Whitman’s “laughing party of mechanics,” the men Gedney photographed in east Kentucky were certainly amicable with him. These photographs are among Gedney’s best, but the seeds of this project lie in his own autobiography and can already be glimpsed in the early pictures of his grandparents collected under the detached title “The Farm.”

A farm boy himself, Gedney was always fixing things: repairing, mending, adjusting, tinkering (he loved the mechanics of the camera and darkroom). This was one of the affinities he shared with the two families of unemployed coal miners—the Couches and the Cornetts—he lived with and photographed for a month in 1964. He became especially close to the Cornetts, to Willie, Vivian, and their twelve children, staying in touch with them for years and returning, in 1972, to make further photographs.

Gedney liked the grace and lightness of the Cornett girls. When he returned in 1972 they had grown up, succumbed to the heavy chore of breeding, and his eye was drawn overwhelmingly to the malnourished strength of the male Cornetts (he saw that strength itself is a skill), to their elegance and economy of movement.

Thinking specifically of Gedney, whom he knew, the artist Peter Bellamy observed that “gesture is the ballet of photography,” a remark that alerts us to the way that Gedney’s men often have the grace of dancers. Again and again in his Kentucky ballet the traditional poses of gender are reversed: two women, one pregnant, one in curlers, both smoking, stand looking at a young man arranging himself seductively on the hood of a car; Vivian sits on a bench while Willie stretches out, draping his long leg over her…

“I do not consider myself a ‘social problem’ photographer,” Gedney wrote in a draft letter intended to interest publishers in his Kentucky project. “I am concerned with making a good photograph—an uncropped blending of form, value and content. I prefer the ordinary action, the intimate gesture, an image whose form is an instinctive reaction to the material.”

There was another aspect of the Cornetts’ life—getting loaded, and the violence that inevitably resulted from it—that does not come under the rubric of “the intimate gesture,” but this absence in Gedney’s photos does not compromise his Kentucky work (he was not, after all, aiming to be comprehensive). A similar lack does become a problem, though, in the project that intervened between his two sessions in Kentucky: photographing the disaffected youth—hippies in the process of formation—in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco in 1966–67. He could photograph them going about their business—more accurately, he could photograph them not going about their business—but the core of the Haight, the thing that defined it not only as a place but also as a historical moment, was the psychedelic experience. And that was unphotographable.

If initially it seemed difficult for onlookers to understand the special energy of the Haight in 1966, writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven, his seminal account “LSD and the American Dream,” it soon dawned on them that “on any given day roughly half the people in the Haight were either tripping, or had been tripping, or were about to trip.” The elaborate multimedia lengths to which the likes of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey went to simulate acid trips—for those unwilling to sample the drug—served mainly to prove the unrecordable nature of the experience. Armed only with a camera and black-and-white film, Gedney faced an almost impossible task—albeit one of his own choosing. Gedney never worked on assignment; he went and photographed wherever and whomever he was drawn to. He was drawn to this place and these people by something they shared with the Cornetts: they were a distinctive group, disenfranchised, on the fringes of society. The difference, of course, was that the disenfranchisement of the hippies was voluntary, self-elected. The Cornetts lacked material things (and therefore treasured them); the hippies were discarding them. And while the Cornetts seemed to have been marooned by history, in the Haight a radically new, potentially revolutionary structure of feeling was making itself apparent. Gedney was unconvinced by the larger, narco-ideological imperatives, preferring to travel at “the bottom of pyramids. By that I mean I don’t often meet the higher ups in a movement or scene, the ones who will tell you what it’s all about, which is something quite different from what is happening. I am a walker of streets, talking to people, taking pictures.”

On the basis of these pictures, Gedney seems to have felt ambivalent about what he was witnessing: drawn to the almost tribal feeling of kinship and community, but not entirely comfortable with people who, so to speak, did not share his affection for squares. This is what gives his pictures their unique historical importance. After intense media attention, the Haight became a popular destination for tourists eager for a glimpse of what was going on beyond “the beaded curtain.” Whether they were outraged, fascinated, or simply aghast at what they were witnessing, these observers from the straight world effectively shared the hippies’ own idea of themselves: namely, that they had reinvented themselves totally, moved on to another, virtually unrecognizable way of living. Taken from within the world by someone who remained skeptical of many of its grander claims, Gedney’s photographs show “hippies” for what they were: teenage boys from Illinois, girls from the nice suburbs of middle America. The extraordinary thing about the people in these photographs, in other words, is that they are so ordinary. Haircut aside, the guy stretched out on the hood of a car might as well be in east Kentucky as in Northern California. For Gedney the essential gestures remained the same: “the power of youth, the proclamation of a new way,” he noted, “but it is only the old way made to look new.” In keeping with this guarded view, his own pictures make the new look old, as if the photos somehow predated their subject. Or, to make the same point the opposite way, they make the 1960s seem like they happened a long time ago: in the 1950s, in fact!

Unable to find himself in the people he saw, he documented an emergent lifestyle that could not be articulated by the photographic aesthetic at his disposal. Tellingly, a dummy of his planned book, A Time of Youth, starts with a shot of a closed door on which is scrawled an exhaustive list of all those who are not welcome to enter. Gedney could record the people who passed through, but, photographically, the doors of perception remained closed.

Whereas the world of the Cornetts—to which he was welcomed back, in 1972—was far more accessible. Photographs here were easy to come by (on one occasion, three potentially distinct photographs share a single frame) and their focus, the hub of the Cornetts’ world, was the car.

“Junior and his girlfriend wanted to get married,” Gedney noted archly, “but the only justice of the peace they could find was working all day at a gas station so he performed the service there. It seems appropriate since so much of the thoughts and actions of the male Cornetts involve automobiles that one of their clan should be married in a gas station.”

Cars, for the Cornetts, are to be repaired, plundered for spares, patched up. To be gathered round, examined, discussed. The car is a mechanical agora or forum: a meeting place to exchange bare-chested opinions about carburetors or brake linings. Familiarity with such parts is expressed by kicking them; knowledge of engines by letting cigarette ash drop into the combustible tangle of tubes and sparks.

The best caption for these pictures of the Cornetts and their cars is provided by another photographer. When Diane Arbus learned to drive, she “loved the feel of the steering wheel and the gearshift.” It was, she said, “like getting to know universal gestures [she had] always been aware of.” That is exactly the function of the automobile in Gedney’s photos: the site and generator of universal gestures. For the Cornett children an automobile engine is a mystery to be initiated into. A man holds his baby up for a first peer into the engine, a baptism of oil at the altar of mechanics. A teenage boy genuflects beneath a jacked-up wheel, worshipping. As a car sinks into utter uselessness it becomes a part of the landscape, a relic. A truck looks as site specific as the stoop of a house. Its tires are like wooden poles sunk into the ground. A boy lies under the hood of a car, reaching up an arm as if pulling a shiny car-patterned eiderdown over himself. Someone else leans on the hood like he’s ordering drinks at a bar. An adolescent girl with famine legs stands in front of a huge truck that looks nothing if not immovable. The one thing the Cornetts never seem to do with their vehicles is drive them. They’re stuck.

Long after he had abandoned plans to publish a book of his Kentucky photos—or any others, for that matter—Gedney singled out a phrase from Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone”—“short distances and definite places”—as a “possible title for a book of photos.” There are no establishing shots (to help orient the outsider) or panoramic vistas in Gedney’s Kentucky photos. The Cornetts’ world is circumscribed absolutely by the known, the familiar. Careworn she might be, but Vivian on the porch is sheltered from the fathomless despair of Dorothea Lange’s iconic “High Plains Woman,” in which the surrounding sky suggests an infinity of distress. Of course this situation breeds its own claustrophobic pressure as well as consolations, but, for Gedney, an overall truth is always predicated on precision of circumstance and closely observed detail. If these are outstanding pictures of hardship and resilience, that is because they are also outstanding photographs of belts—more precisely, of belt loops—pockets, zippers, and shoes. The Cornetts are individualized so sharply that they are recognizable by their shoes and trousers. So much so that, in a photograph of half a dozen pairs of trousers hung out to dry, the male Cornetts are all implicitly there.

Those who lack things are defined most conspicuously by what they own, and in Gedney’s photographs every thing—a can of brake fluid, a bag of Henderson’s sugar—is valued, used. It has been said that if Balzac describes a hat, that is because someone is about to put it on his head. If there is a wrench in Gedney’s photographs, that is because it is going to be picked up and used to mend something, to fix something, to repair something. The only useful noun is a verb. Hand, for example. The mechanical world is a problem to be solved and hands are the medium of thought, of figuring. The knowledge—and ignorance—of generations is in the hands of the Cornetts.

Hands alert us also to the fact that Gedney was one of the great photographers of touch. Stieglitz’s claim—that “the quality of touch in its deepest living sense” was inherent in his photographs—applies just as accurately to Gedney’s. He remembered, as a child at his grandparents’ farm, “the delight of being able to touch so many things of different textures.” As a mature photographer he saw—literally—that the idea of tactile value held good for photographs as well as painting and sculpture. Many of the best photographs do not work only on the eye but also engage at least one of the other senses: touch, in Gedney’s case.

Like so many tendencies in Gedney’s work, this responsiveness to the tactile is felt most powerfully in the photographs he made in the course of two extended trips to India, in 1969–71 and 1979–80. “Everything in India is handled personally.… India is a place of direct contact,” he noted. The way Indians sit “involves much more physical contact with their own bodies.… The clothes Indians wear, of simple light fabrics draped with many folds, make one aware of the movement of cloth against the body.” Even the walls and roads have a direct, “man handled feeling. Tea is drunk from clay cups made to be thrown away. Delicately fluted on the potter’s wheel it gives the tea an edge, a subtle taste of the hand that made it, of the earth that gave it birth.” He was delighted by a sign in a museum that stressed not that it was forbidden to touch the exhibits but only, more mildly, that “Touch Is Discouraged.”

India’s culture of “direct contact” enabled Gedney to visually handle the spiritual life of the people he was photographing. In the gnarled hands of an old woman we do not just see someone praying, we see prayer itself. The physical everywhere bore the imprint of the spiritual. Wherever he looked he saw “men of the crudest, lowest uneducated classes standing in positions of the utmost refinement, rivaling Greek sculptures without the stillness of idealized form.” He also found himself seduced, visually, by Indian women who embodied precisely the grace and lightness that he had observed, fleetingly, in the Cornett girls and, more enduringly, in their brothers. He had long been alert to those moments when life briefly patterned itself on the classic images of Western art. In Benares (where Gedney stayed for most of his first Indian trip) the way people’s limbs echoed the formsof the deities they were constructing was a tangible illustration of something that was far more difficult to capture: a momentary gesture’s capacity to contain the timelessness of myth. To enable himself to recognize such moments, Gedney immersed himself in the study of every aspect of Hindu history, culture, ritual, thought, and myth.

Like any traveler cut adrift from his own stock of books, he also read whatever came to hand. And the highly contingent nature of his reading proved serendipitous. A crucial insight into the ancient city of Benares, for example, came from Tom Jones:

Mankind has always taken great delight in knowing and descanting on the actions of others. Hence there have been, in all ages and nations, certain places set apart for public rendezvous where the curious might meet and satisfy their mutual curiosity. Among these, the barber’s shops have justly borne the pre-eminence.

Having transcribed this passage, Gedney added a note of his own: “All of Benares is a large barber shop.”

By the terms of Fielding’s analysis, the barbershop that featured prominently in each of Gedney’s earlier pictures of the El was the hub, the focus, of Myrtle Avenue. Which meant, by extension, that Benares was like that focal point of Myrtle Avenue infinitely dispersed and refracted. “How do Indian streets differ from American streets?” Gedney asked himself in Benares. Partly by the way that, in America, at some point life inevitably retreats indoors, becomes hidden. But in the barbershop streets of Benares everything was on display constantly: “Indian streets serve as much a part of an Indian’s life as his home.… One of the great freedoms of Indian life is its streets. The right of people to squat anywhere.… People sleep, work, play, eat, fight, relax, relieve themselves, die in streets. All human activity takes place there.”

Everything was revealed all the time, and the effect was overwhelming, exhausting. “You see too much, your eyes want rest,” he grumbled from the relative tranquility of Delhi. It was the hassle, the constant hassle, that got to him. On occasions the man who had seen the smallest increment of the quotidian touched by the sacred could feel only loathing for a people who “devour each other in the pig-sty of their soul-less existence.” The next day he explains and retracts this outburst: “The above was of course written after a very tiring day. My work puts me into constant close contact with mass public. I work in the midst of the daily existence.”

Which is what he had always wanted, of course. The difference was that in Brooklyn he could retreat indoors to his apartment, his books. In Benares there was no possibility of retreat, no window from which he could observe, unseen, detached. Life was clambering all over him. The struggle, photographically, was to find his own space, to find quietness in the midst of perpetual bustle. Tourists photographing people washing on the ghats of Benares saw only the event, the spectacle. Gedney had to train himself to find a pictorial equivalent of the space that all of those bathing individuals found for themselves. He had to enter that space, find room for himself. Which was difficult for a Westerner (nothing irritated him more than being mistaken for “a tourist or hippie”), especially a Westerner with a camera. Either people would yell out that he could not photograph here or, as soon as they saw him, would pose, smiling. If he said, “Don’t smile, act natural”—one of the first entries in the customized Hindi phrase book he compiled—they would become even more self-conscious. The solution? To learn to dissolve into his surroundings. To become invisible. Which was far, far easier to do at night.

The dummy of his book on youths in the Haight began with a closed door. His night series from Benares, by contrast, opens with a road, a way into “the wealth of shadows” where the “bodies of citizens sprawled on narrow ledges,” where limbs were “bent in unconscious grace,” where he could observe “movements unobserved by the mover.”

In an undated manuscript fragment he had written of the—by no means uncommon—pleasure of looking “at the one you love while he is asleep.” In the night streets of Benares he photographed all sleepers as if they were the beloved. These pictures of people dreaming are like a dream come true for Gedney. He became a guardian, a custodian of dreams, passing among the sleepers like Whitman:

I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,
Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping…

And photographing, unnoticed, invisible. That is why he had felt so at ease among the Cornetts: they took no notice of him (they might have paid more attention to him if he’d been a car part) while he noticed everything about them. Look at his photograph of Indian boys playing (football?) in the street: how close he is, how indifferent they are to him, as if he were not there. It is this absence that enables us to identify the picture as quintessentially Gedneyan.

In 1969 he had taken a series of self-portraits in which nothing of his head could be seen. In the picture of those kids playing there is, in the background, a figure whose head has been similarly amputated by the picture frame, not participating, watching. By association, then, this figure is a self-projection of Gedney, an explicit reminder of how the bulk of his self-portraits were of other people. Alerted to that figure, we become conscious of others who go almost unnoticed in the background, in the margins of Gedney’s pictures: the fourth girl, for example, who is almost completely hidden by one of the three girls in the Cornetts’ kitchen.

This, then, is how Gedney was most emphatically himself: going about his business, unnoticed, unobserved. If the corollary of this was that he should not be recognized, that his achievement go unrecognized, that was a price he was prepared to pay. Which was why, as Gedney’s friend Christine Osinski suggested, it was the worst “of all curses to get something where he would get noticed.”

He suffered from increasingly poor health throughout the mid-1980s. In March 1987, he learned that he had AIDS. He had always loved fixing things but the rest of his life would be spent trying to fix, to repair, himself. In 1985 he had moved to a new house in Staten Island where he did not set up his darkroom, where his books remained in crates. His plans for a book on Benares came to nothing. Nothing came to anything. He had glimpsed this tendency in himself in India: “Withdrawn, detached too far, become not objective or subjective but beyond. Beyond photographs or thought, capable of action no longer. It happens sometimes, the futility of all being.” Now it began to seem like a destiny.

He seems already to have lost interest in taking new photographs before becoming seriously ill. He took some pictures of gay marches in New York, a few more in Paris in 1982, but after returning from his second Indian trip in 1980 he made relatively few new photographs. Who knows? Perhaps he had seen enough in India to last him the rest of his days. Mainly he devoted himself to developing and printing hundreds of rolls of film, sifting and sorting, choosing and discarding, arranging and rearranging his life’s work. He began to live posthumously.

He spent more and more time reading and transcribing what he read. George Steiner has written that learning a poem by heart means that we make it part of our bloodstream, and Gedney, by dint of tireless transcription, was attempting something like a total blood transfusion. In India he had sought to dissolve almost entirely into his surroundings. Now he began to dissolve into what he read. In his final book of “Transcriptions and Notes” his own life becomes reduced to a few entries in red ink: “Nov. 9, 1985 finally completely moved in to 24 Van Tuyl St, Staten Island after one year in the Pratt faculty house.” Everything else was given over to other people’s words, other people’s lives. And yet, at the same time, everything he read began adding up to a surrogate biography, a vicarious commentary on his own work. He saw his life refracted through the prism of other people’s words. It was another way of not being noticed. Of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.

The last half dozen pictures of what seems to be Gedney’s last roll of exposed film were shot in March 1987 (the month he learned he had AIDS) and developed in 1997, eight years after his death. Possibly he clicked off a few photos of things close to hand, just to use up the film. Still, they are the last photos we have and as such have an inevitable place in the narrative of his life and work. They show the clutter of his desk, the things he used on a daily basis (paper clips, brushes, stamps, pencils), the things he used for seeing: magnifying glass, spectacles. On an index card is written EYE EXAM. The last properly exposed frame is a close-up of his art books and exhibition catalogs, packed tightly on the shelf.

The last picture we have of him is on his Gay Men’s Health Crisis card. The card is valid “through Dec. 31, 1989”—six months longer than he would need it for. It shows a bespectacled middle-aged man in a scruffy brown sweater: unexceptional, a bit sad-looking, his neck and chin marked by dark blotches. If we had to sum up in a word the impression conveyed by this photograph of a man who had devoted his life to teaching himself to see, our first choice might well be myopic. His gaze is neither penetrating nor alert but, on reflection, we would amend that verdict to accepting.

It is a picture taken by a machine that didn’t see, know, or care what it was photographing.

His death, on June 23, 1989, merited only the briefest obituary—three cursory paragraphs—in the New York Times. He left his work to his friend Lee Friedlander.