DRISKEL VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY

July 25 --August 13, 2003

Opening Reception: Friday, July 25, 7-10 p.m.

WILLIAM GEDNEY

Driskel Vintage Photography at the Schoolhouse Center for Art & Design in Provincetown, Massachusetts, presents a major exhibition of rare vintage prints of photographs by the late New York photographer, William Gedney.

William Gedney died in 1989 when he was 56, leaving several bodies of work, eloquent visual studies of people surviving in stressful circumstances. He had a wonderful talent for transforming gritty genre scenes into moody poetry. After study at Pratt Institute in New York and two years work at Conde Nast, Gedney, in 1964, traveled to the coal mining region of northern Kentucky to photograph the Cornett family. Willie Cornett had just lost his job and struggled to support his wife Vivian and their twelve children. Returning to the family again in 1972, Gedney completed a luminous and loving record of rural life: a shirtless father and his sons working on cars; sisters standing one- legged, like young herons, in a decrepit, sun -washed kitchen. Drifting through the communes of Haight -Ashbury in San Francisco or the night streets of Calcutta and Benares, India, Gedney creates a somnambulist’s dream of lounging drifters and sleeping street people.

His extraordinary talents were recognized early on by John Szarkowski, then Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Gedney was given a solo show at the museum in 1968 consisting of his photographs of the Cornett family of Kentucky and his San Francisco photographs. Again, in 1972 his work was shown at MOMA in a survey of American photography after 1960. Gedney received grants from the Guggenheim and Fullbright foundations and was on the faculties at Pratt Institute and Cooper Union. Upon his death in 1989 the bulk of Gedney’s work, photographs and notebooks, was donated by his brother Richard and his good friend photographer Lee Friedlander to the Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library at Duke University.

 

 

 

 

The Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design
494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA 02657
(508) 487-4800
lcollins@schoolhousecenter.com
Contact: Larry Collins