What Was True

The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney

Edited by Margaret Sartor, co-editor Geoff Dyer, foreword by Maria Friedlander

A Lyndhurst Book published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in association with W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 1999

This is an extraordinary collection by an enigmatic photographer whose work is published here for the first time. William Gedney died in 1989, leaving behind a lifetime of photographic work, most of it unknown outside of a few colleagues and curators. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment window to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, Gedney’s unobtrusive view reveals the beauty and mystery of daily life. Excerpts from Gedney’s correspondence and notebooks help us understand this intensely private man who captured the people and places around him with such striking clarity and intimacy. What Was True accompanied a retrospective exhibition of William Gedney’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.