a dialogue with solitude
Dave Heath

exhibition venue: City Art Gallery

In 1961, Dave Heath assembled the photographs that he had been making throughout the fifties into a poetic sequence. The original plan for a book, as he envisioned it, would be a large format, akin to LIFE magazine. When the book was eventually published, in 1965, it was reduced in size. Nevertheless, A Dialogue With Solitude was a landmark in photography - it quickly went out-of-print and for the last thirty years has been highly sought by collectors.

As he says in the preface:
Disenchantment, strife and anxiety enshroud our times in stygian darkness. Pressed from all sides by the rapid pace of technological progress and increased authoritarian control, many people are caught up in an anguish of alienation. Adrift and without sense of purpose, they are compelled to engage in a dialogue with the inmost depths of their being in a search for renewal; the burden of anarchy rests heavily upon them.

Biography / curriculum vitae:
Born in 1931, Dave Heath grew up in foster homes and orphanages in the Philadelphia area. He served in Korea at the tail end of the war and came back with his interest in photography ever keener.

After time spent in post-secondary schools in Philadelphia and Chicago he moved to New York City (in 1957) where he developed his own personal style of "street photography," working as a photo assistant on the side to earn a living.
In 1965 he published a book of black & white photography called A Dialogue With Solitude, a hard to find classic now being republished in a new edition.

He taught at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio and the Moore College of Art in Pennsylvania in the late sixties before moving on to Toronto and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute from 1970 to 1996. He continued to photograph but soon moved away from black & white - his new mediums became Polaroid (he participated in a project with Robert
Frank, John Wood, and Heinecken in 1975), slide sound projections and journals (a visual notebook of perceptions and obsessions), which he continues to build today.

For further information on Dave Heath 's work visit this web site: www.photographerinterviews.com/2001/heath/
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