One of the photographers I came across whilst undertaking Context and Narrative was Dave Heath. I saw a small exhibition of his work at the Photographers Gallery and blogged about it here.

Heath had a difficult childhood, his father leaving the family when he was one, his mother abondoning him when he was four and his grandparents declining to raise him. As a result he was raised in an orphanage and a series of foster homes in Philadelphia. It is possible that this difficult upbringing influenced his work much of which has a sense of sadness about it.

Many of Heath’s images are portraits of people who were unaware of being photographed and he used a telephoto lens to be able to take pictures from a distance. I think this approach would be more difficult to achieve now as I think that the use of long lenses to photograph people without their permission is viewed as unacceptable. Although Heath’s photographs were in no way salacious there is a vulnerability to them that I doubt people nowadays would be comfortable with being portrayed.

From my own experience of photographing perople for exercise 2.2 – covert, whilst at times I felt uncomfortable, I think if people objected to what I was doing they could confront me. However, taking someone’s picture, especially when they depict people who appear emotional or vulnerable, when they are not aware, to me would have felt exploitative.

However, Heath was taking photographs in the 1950s and 1960s when the view of society to being photographed was undoubtedly different to that of today, and his approach did enable him to produce images that captured the emotion of the people he photographed.

Image 1 – “Kansas City, Missouri, March 1967” (negative); 1968 (print), by Dave Heath (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri: Gift of the Hall Family Foundation)

Image 2 – Howard Crawford Jr., Korea, 1953/54 © Dave Heath, courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery

Image 3 – Dave Heath, Untitled, 1963. © Estate of Dave Heath, Art Institue of Chicago

Sources

Woodward, R. (2016). Dave Heath, Photographer of Isolation, Dies at 85. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/arts/dave-heath-photographer-of-isolation-dies-at-85.html [Accessed 14 Feb. 2020].

Adams, J. (2016). Dave Heath: A haunted genius behind the camera. [online] The Globe and Mail. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/dave-heath-a-haunted-genius-behind-the-camera/article31085787/ [Accessed 14 Feb. 2020].

Edwards, H. (2020). Hugh Edwards | Dave Heath. [online] Archive.artic.edu. Available at: https://archive.artic.edu/edwards/dave-heath/ [Accessed 14 Feb. 2020].

Laudenslager, E. (2015). Home at last: Dave Heath at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. [online] Artblog. Available at: https://www.theartblog.org/2015/10/home-at-last-dave-heath-at-the-philadelphia-museum-of-art/ [Accessed 14 Feb. 2020].