In the City:Dave Heath's Dialogues with Solitudes.

"My pictures are not about the city but from the city. I've always seen it as a stage and I've always seen the people in the streets as being actors, not acting out a particular play or story but somehow being the story itself. Baudelaire called the flaneur the one whose purpose is to endow the crowd with a soul" - Dave Heath.

 

Chicago (1955) 

Dave Heath, whose Dialogues with Solitudes exhibition I attended recently at The Photographers' Gallery, was a new name on me. Born in Philadelphia in 1931, he was abandoned by his parents at four years old, grew up in orphanages, and died just three years ago. According to an information board at the start of this small retrospective he occupied "a unique place in the history of American photography, influenced by W. Eugene Smith (who I'd also not heard of) and photographers of the Chicago School (nope), including Aaron Siskind (yay, got one at last) and Harry Callahan (oops, back to square one).

There are elements of both documentary and experimentalism in his work but Heath was in truth neither. It left him in danger of falling between two stools and perhaps that's why his name is not more well known. But it also imbued his work with a more human feel than some of his contemporaries. 

His early revelation appears to have come with the discovery of a photo essay, Bad Boy's Story by Ralph Crane, in Life magazine when he was fifteen years old. An essay of which Heath said "I immediately recognised myself in this story and photography as my means of expression".

Six years later he was dispatched to Korea as a machine gunner where, when he wasn't machine gunning, he started to capture his first 'inner landscapes'. Heath chose as his subject matter not the battlefields but the soldiers themselves, their quiet moments, lost in their own thoughts. He searched for what he called "the vulnerability of a consciousness turned inwards" and when he returned home to Philadelphia (and visited New York and Chicago) he continued in the same vein. Was he seeing similarities in the harsh urban environments of post-war America and the war torn streets of Seoul?

New York City (c.1957)

In 1961 he conceived, and four years later it was published, his own A Dialogue with Solitude (for which this exhibition has taken its name in much the same way as some albums are named after their most outstanding song) in which he aimed to capture the spirit of the sixties, the zeitgeist if you must! A decade of Civil Rights activism, Vietnam War protests, all set to the soundtrack of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Motown, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus.

In some ways, Heath was aiming for a state of the nation address in much the same way as some of these artists and those that hit their political stride in the early seventies like Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Gil Scott-Heron, and The Last Poets.

Then, in 1970, Heath devoted himself to teaching, and moved to Canada where he became a citizen and lived for the rest of his life. The brevity of his photography career looks another plausible reason why he's not better known. Even this exhibition is fleshed out with three cult films from the era:- 1968's Salesman by Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Mitchell Zwerin, 1960's The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick), and Shirley Clarke's 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason. You could watch them if you had a spare four hour and twenty-five minutes. I didn't. The gallery was due to close in about an hour.

Allan Ginsberg & Barbara Moraff, 7 Arts Coffee Gallery, NYC

Hall of Issues, Judson Memorial Church

Maybe another time. For now, I stuck with Heath's photographs. They've been arranged, as Heath instructed, into themes (or 'chapters') including solitude, anarchy, violence, love, childhood, old age, poverty, war, race, youth, and death and each preceded by a brief literary citation from names as respected as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Herman Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Louis Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, James Baldwin, and William Hazlitt.

I'm not sure the grouping or theming really improves the work, to be honest. It's the photographs themselves that provide the emotional heft of the exhibition rather than any over-riding concept. The forlorn expression of the young girl from Chicago, 55, that heads up this consideration is one of those pictures that speak a thousand words. You can create your own narrative for it, you can speculate on what's on her mind, but, of course, you can never know. Heath's caught an intimate moment in her interior life and frozen it for all of time.

He's done that at the Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square in Greenwich Village too, and even with the beat poets Allan Ginsberg and Barbara Moraff but, for me, it's when he focuses on children and soldiers (both groups of people often put in terrifying environments of which they have little or no control over) that he really captures something that looks a lot like truth.

Layout of A Dialogue With Solitude (1961-1962)

Layout of A Dialogue With Solitude (1961-1962)

Korea (1963-1964)

The absorption of his subjects ring true. Many of them black men whose ancestors were brought to America as slaves and are now sent out to do their cruel master's bidding, many losing their lives (as did many poor white American soldiers), and many returning to an indifferent and inhuman USA that seemed remarkably comfortable with letting the people who'd fought for their freedom (or, often, so the US could expand its world domination) live, beg, and die on the streets.

Korea (1963-1964)

Korea (1963-1964)

Korea (1963-1964)

Shadowy figures, gaunt faces, and pained expressions populate the Korean War portraits but they don't look all that different to some of the beaten down people, often there's a defiance against the odds, Heath found as he perambulated around America's great cities. One lady in Chicago, dressed in what appears to be her Sunday best, stares at the floor in what looks like utter resignation. There's nearly as much get up and go in a photo of the same city's parking lot taken eleven years later - and that's not got a single person in it. Just a sneaky fin of some fancy American car.

Chicago (1955)

Chicago (Parking lot) (1966)

Washington Square, New York City (c.1959)

Washington Square, New York City (c.1960)

The New York photos seem to have a bit more sass than the Chicago ones. Obviously we don't know these people's names, we don't know their stories, we don't know what's happening in their lives, and we don't know what went on to happen in their lives. All we have is this excerpt.

But what a powerful 'excerpt' some of Heath's images are. A pensive puff of a fag here, a pert pout there, and the haughty disdain of a young boy who can't be much older than ten years old as he, seemingly, surveys both the scene and what the future holds for him.

Washington Square, New York City (1960)

New York City (1962)

Dave Heath said "I had no community in terms of the experience of a real family that was binding in the here and now, that's why I had the need to enter back into the human community. I did so by inventing a poetic form that would bind the human community, if only symbolically".  

You can see where he's coming from. He clearly understands his own motivations for doing this and, just maybe, once he'd done it he felt at peace with himself and then moved to Canada to live out the rest of his life quietly as a teacher (well, probably not that quietly in that profession). Or, another theory, was he so disgusted by what he saw in America, how that country brutalised its own (and other country's) citizens, that he walked away in disgust? Had he stared the beast in the face and decided he wanted nothing to do with it?

I think that's too easy a theory, too pat a conclusion. I think Dave Heath loved America as much as he hated it. I think he saw it as we'd see an old friend who'd allowed bitterness and rancour to turn them sour. I think he was looking not just to heal himself (being abandoned aged four has got to leave some serious psychological scars) but to heal his divided nation, almost as if he was a synecdoche for America itself. That's a job for more than one person (and it's a job that needs doing now more than it even did in the sixties) so who can blame Heath for heading north and getting on with his own life?

But, of course, this is just what I think. I'll never know what Dave Heath thought and I'll never know what his subjects thought. The thoughts of others, we have to sometimes accept, often remain unknowable.

Chicago, December (1965)