39
B+Wwar. By then he was using a Kodak Retina,
but this folding 35mm camera met a sticky
end when he dropped it while disembarking
a boat. Once again he saved up his pay
(this time from combat duties) and spent it
on a camera – a Nikon with a 50mm lens.
Understandably, film was hard to come by,
but Heath made a deal with an army supply
company to purchase 20 rolls of Kodak
Plus-X every month. When off-duty he could
be found documenting fellow soldiers at rest.
He was particularly attracted to subjects who
appeared still, fragile and lost in thought- attributes he would seek repeatedly
throughout his photographic career.
I
n 1954 Heath returned to the United
States and continued to explore the idea
of using photography to reveal a subject’s
inner landscape. Walking the streets of
Philadelphia, Chicago and later New York
(where he lived from 1957 to 1970) he
identified strangers who looked detached
or vulnerable in some way and trained hislens on them. He avoided conversation
and many of his images were taken with
a telephoto lens (resulting in significant
cropping in the darkroom) to preserve
his anonymity. He later confessed that
photographing strangers during moments
of quiet introspection was an attempt to
deal with the loss of his mother.
Heath was an expert printer – a skill
he perfected under the tutorage of W.
Eugene Smith – and he used a combination
of burning and bleaching to exaggerate
contrast and direct the viewer’s eye. So
good were his skills that he printed many
of Robert Frank’s images. Frank, in turn,
influenced Heath. From an early age he had
been interested in making books (when he
was a teenager he produced big scrapbooks
featuring newspaper clippings, pig hair and
notes relating to the atomic bomb tests).
Later he learned the art of sequencing,
primarily by studying Frank’s book The
Americans and Walker Evans’ American
Photographs. He took great pleasure increating poetic structure via sequencing and
chose to ignore chronology.
In 1965 Heath released A Dialogue with
Solitude. Four years in the making, this
radical book encapsulated the restless mood
of post-war America. The tension can be
read in the bodies and faces of those he
photographed – men and women totally
absorbed in thought. There’s a loneliness to
the images, a feeling that these individuals
are unreachable, if only for a moment. Heath
was shy, but his upbringing left him with
a desire to make connections with people.
Having never had a family or a place that
defined him he chose to make connections
with mankind as a whole, exploring themes
of loss, pain, love and hope. He died in 2016
at the age of 85.Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes
is on display at the Photographers’
Gallery in London until 2 June,
thephotographersgallery.org.uk.›
© Dave Heath/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulgar Gallery, TorontoOpposite Washington Square, New York City, 1960. | Below California, 1964.