 |
William Gedney made two trips to eastern Kentucky. In the summer of 1964, he traveled to the Blue Diamond Mining Camp in Leatherwood, Kentucky and stayed for awhile at the home of Boyd Couch, head of the local United Mine Workers Union. Then Gedney met Willie Cornett, who was recently laid off from the mines, his wife Vivian, and their twelve children. He soon moved in with the Cornett family, staying with them for eleven days. Twenty-two of the photographs from Gedney's 1964 visit to Kentucky were included in his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (December 1968 through March 1969). Gedney corresponded with the Cornetts over many years, and finally returned to Kentucky to visit and photograph the family again in 1972.
In his notebooks Gedney writes about these lives he witnessed and photographed, the complicated relationships within such large families, the importance of the automobile. Gedney made notes about a creating a book dummy of the Kentucky work, but no completed dummy exists in the archive. With the exception of one image, the Kentucky photographs were never published during William Gedney's lifetime. From the Duke University web site |
Gedney sold the one photo in 1977, apparently for $70.00 since he sent $35.00 to the Cornetts indicating, "I made myself a promise that if I ever sold any of the pictures I took of your family I would split any money with you."
Gedney's photography reveals the poverty in which the Cornetts and their neighours lived, but that was not his primary aim. He was chronicling people of a time and place. Poverty was part of that and most definitely helped to shape their lives, but Gedney's photography did not make it the focus, rather content and structure were.
No comments :
Post a Comment