Gilles Mora

Mysterious, introspective, fiercely private, and self-taught, street photographer William Gedney (1932–1989) produced impressive series of images focused on people whose lives were overlooked, hidden, or reduced to stereotypes. He was convinced that photography was a means of expression as efficient as literature, and his images were accompanied by writings, essays, excerpts from books, and aphorisms. Gedney avoided self-promotion, and his underrepresented work was largely unknown during his short lifetime. He died at the age of fifty-six from AIDS. William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955–1984 is the first comprehensive retrospective of his photography. It presents images from all of his major series, including eastern Kentucky, where Gedney lived with and photographed the family of laid-off coal miner Willie Cornett; San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury, where he attached himself to a group of disaffected youth, photographing them as they drifted from one vacant apartment to the next during the “Summer of Love”; early photo-reportage of gay pride parades in the eighties; Benares, India, Gedney’s first trip abroad, during which he obsessively chronicled the concurrent difficulty and beauty of daily life; and night scenes that, in the absence of people and movement, evoke a profound universal loneliness. The most complete overview of Gedney’s work to date, this volume reveals the undeniable beauty of a major American photographer.

In 1972, Gilles Mora and his wife Françoise left France to teach the French language in public schools in Louisiana. At the time, he knew nothing about photography. Fascinated by the Deep South, however, Mora soon started a photographic project on its culture. Greatly influenced by artists such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Eudora Welty, and Clarence John Laughlin; playing music with some of the major figures of the rockabilly scene, including Carl Perkins; and infused with the sensuality of the South, Mora produced a unique body of pictures over more than twenty years. Rarely exhibited or published, the images in Antebellum present a kind of travelogue, a photographic recording of Mora’s personal mythologies, which evoke the disappearing world of the Deep South.

Over the course of a decade, French photographer Jean-Luc Bertini traveled the length and breadth of the United States, creating portraits of the unique circumstance of isolation fostered by the country’s geographic circumstances and its espousal of an individualist ethos. Bertini casts his subjects against the vast backdrops of the country, exploring all the nuances of isolation, from solitude to loneliness. This perspective produces an usual and fresh take on America as a nation. In his preface, Richard Ford, author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, focuses on the physiognomies of solitude in America: “Looking at his work, we build up an idea of the unique character of American solitudes, in non-binary terms, in which what is ours does not only belong to us.”