Dave Heath | 1960’s

Exhibition Dates: September 9 – October 28, 2006

By the age of four Dave Heath had been abandoned by both of his parents. By the age of fifteen he had lived in a series of foster homes and, finally, in an orphanage. Given that only his mother was of the Jewish tradition yet this is how he was being raised as well as the lack of any family support, he did not feel that he belonged anywhere. However, through the study of Jewish history he gained an understanding of a human community and our individual commitments to survival. Coupling this with American history Heath began to lay the groundwork for his belief in a purposeful life. At this early age, Heath knew that he wanted to be an artist seeing this as the best way to experience the world and come to define himself within in.   

In May 1947, Heath saw Ralph Crane’s photo-essay in LIFE Magazine called “Bad Boy’s Life”. Struck by the success of how succinctly these pictures connected to a deeply felt shared experience, Heath knew he wanted to become a photographer. Using the orphanage’s darkroom, he began to master the mechanics of the medium. Thwarted by enrolling vocational school by its restrictive enrolment policy, he dropped out of high school and became a darkroom printer at a commercial lab. A book by John Whiting called Photography is a Language helped him understand the complexity of the medium. It was Heath’s passionate dedication to a self-directed study of history, art and the role of an artist which defined his existence.

Working in the street, Heath used its inhabitants to capture individual moments in tightly structured compositions that are charged with the importance of their individuality and the seriousness of their situation. Early on, he was inspired by the ability of a sequence of photographs vs. a single image to evoke the complexity of his story. At the age of 21 he composed his first Marquette called “3” and in the intervening years worked his subsequent photographs into elaborate sequences culminating in 1961’s “A Dialogue With Solitude,” published as a book in 1965.

This exhibition concentrates on work made on trips financed through Guggenheim Fellowship Grants he received in 1963 and 1964. We will display his 1963 portfolio/sequence in the form of its original camera ready set made to scale for the 1963/1964 Contemporary Photographer winter issue. We will also show a sample of the some 350 gang-proofs made from his 1964 bus trip across the United States as well as the Maquette for his 1969 sequence “Beyond the Gates of Eden.”