Exhibition: Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath
Venue: National Gallery of Canada, 380 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9N4
My interest in this exhibition began largely with the photobook of the same name. It had been sitting on my wish list for ages, but the price never seemed to fall below 800 to 1,000 Canadian dollars. Since I truly couldn’t afford it, there was only one thing to do: go and see the exhibition for myself—and find out what all the fuss was about.
© Richard Huang
© Richard HuangAmong the most original photographers of the modern era, Dave Heath (born in Philadelphia in 1931; died in Toronto in 2016) evoked a sweeping yet bittersweet vision of modern life. Growing up in foster homes and an orphanage in Philadelphia, he experienced both physical and emotional homelessness, which profoundly shaped his artistic vision. Made in the course of his search for self-understanding, Heath’s photographs bear witness to a universal sense of loneliness and a yearning for human connection.
The exhibition focuses on his street photography: his classic black-and-white images from 1949 to 1969 and his late color photographs from 2001 to 2012. Over the years, Heath’s work underwent striking transformations—from his exquisitely crafted prints and the narrative complexity of his masterpiece A Dialogue with Solitude, through audiovisual slide presentations, to his embrace of color.
Throughout it all, Heath used his camera to explore a shared realm of emotion and ideas. In the end, his photographs reveal the self—his own and ours.
Whether singling out one face in a crowd, capturing an act of violence between siblings, or making a close-up steeped in quiet despair, Dave Heath had an instinctive ability to find the soul behind the public face. Building on the autobiographical approach of American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, he created powerful, penetrating images that explore both the depths and subtleties of human life.
This acclaimed traveling exhibition highlights Heath’s mastery of photographic printing and his innovative use of sequencing. At its heart is his poetic masterpiece A Dialogue with Solitude (1965), a landmark exploration of the potential of the photographic sequence. Other handmade picture books, along with a digital version of his first audiovisual slide presentation, Beyond the Gates of Eden (1969), reveal his profound understanding of photography’s many expressive possibilities.
The exhibition follows Heath’s artistic journey from teenage prodigy to influential photographer, presenting a body of work that reflects the loneliness and alienation of modern life.
Dave Heath: An Ongoing Experiment in Photography
Throughout his career, Dave Heath used a wide range of media and image formats to comment inventively on human strengths and frailties. In his journals, he obsessively recorded his thoughts, observations, and anxieties, assembling Polaroids, magazine images, and studio photographs into dense collages that expressed a sense of self continually taking shape and being remade. He also produced elaborate slide presentations combining popular music, portraits, self-portraits, and more. His compulsive use of the Polaroid camera to document daily life—with its instant images and sheer volume of photographs—anticipated the way phone cameras are used today. Heath understood the power of photography in contemporary society. His obsessive engagement with the medium reflects how identity is continually constructed and dismantled through society’s insatiable appetite for images.
© Richard HuangComing of Age (1949–1963)
“I don’t know why some people become artists and others don’t, but deep within me was a sense of survival—a need to define and assert myself in my own way, rather than in someone else’s. I discovered that to do this, I had to become an artist.” —Dave Heath
Heath was always trying to understand himself through photography. These images reveal his growing skill as a photographer and his interest in subjects rich in symbolic and emotional meaning. He made them in a number of places. Apart from serving in the Korean War from 1953 to 1954, he lived and worked in Philadelphia until mid-1955. After eighteen months in Chicago, he moved to New York in early 1957, where his work began to win critical recognition. His first solo exhibition was held at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery in 1958. By 1963, he had received the first of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships.
© Dave Heath
© Dave Heath
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© Dave HeathA Dialogue with Solitude (1952–1963)
“What I try to communicate in my work is not a sense of futility and despair, but an awareness of the tragic dimension of life. Moments of happiness and joy are fleeting and exceedingly rare… Accepting this truth makes it necessary to express love and concern for the human condition.” —Dave Heath
Heath created A Dialogue with Solitude between 1961 and 1963 and published it in 1965. It is his defining work.
The book is a poetic, wide-ranging statement—an interpretation of shared emotions, suffering, and hope. It is composed of ten visual units, or sequences, each marked by a passage of text at or near its beginning. The exhibition presents the book’s eighty-two gelatin silver photographs, made between 1952 and 1963.
Heath determined every aspect of the book: the order of the photographs, their size and placement on the page, the selection of accompanying texts, and even the typeface.
© Richard Huang
© Dave Heath
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© Dave HeathThe Guggenheim Years (1963–1968)
“I find it difficult to be with people, yet I must have people around me… Take people away and the world vanishes; the universe ceases to exist, and so do I.” —Dave Heath
Heath later shifted his focus from the individual to the crowd. These works embody the collective nature of modern life, forming a vast cultural index—a catalog of the many different kinds of people who make up America.
Unlike his earlier work, Heath made many of these photographs on the street with a telephoto lens, allowing him to remain farther from his subjects. As a result, they feel less intimate than his earlier images, both physically and emotionally.
In 1963, Heath received a prestigious grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, enabling him to photograph in and around New York City. When he received a second grant the following year, he traveled across the United States by bus with the aim of broadening the geographic scope of his work.
© Richard HuangGuggenheim Picture Index (1964–1965)
Heath’s first teaching experience came in early 1965, when he was an artist in residence at the University of Minnesota. During an extended bus journey in the fall of 1964, he had exposed 300 rolls of 35mm film. Using the university’s facilities, he produced an enlarged “picture index” for each roll. These sheets allowed him to begin assessing this vast body of work while showing his students how he worked in the field.
© Richard HuangBeyond the Gates of Eden (1969)
“I needed a new form in which to express these ideas again, and new ideas with which to enrich them. Otherwise, both the form and the ideas would grow stale.” —Dave Heath
Heath stopped taking new photographs in 1968, feeling that he had fully explored the possibilities of his earlier photographic approach. In search of new ways to present photographs, he began investigating the artistic potential of audiovisual slide presentations.
Beyond the Gates of Eden was the first step in these explorations. Heath carefully selected 160 images and arranged them as a two-screen slide presentation. With the exception of an introductory image by Walker Evans, every photograph was his own. The soundtrack begins with Heath reciting a poem by William Everson, followed by Tim Buckley’s song “Pleasant Street.” The result is a meditation on spirituality and the miracle of human life.
The project opened a new field in Heath’s innovative practice, and he continued working in this form into the early 1980s.
© Richard HuangColor Work (2001–2007)
“I think that is the whole beauty of photography: finding something meaningful within the chaos of reality… You are not playing God or changing the world; you are finding art within it.” —Dave Heath
Heath returned to street photography in 2001, this time making color images with a digital camera. The work marked a rich artistic renewal and a return to the themes of streets and crowds. Most of these photographs were made in Toronto and New York City, and they commemorate September 11, 2001. Their saturated color stands in striking contrast to his black-and-white street photographs. These later works offer a beautiful, lyrical summation of his most fundamental artistic concerns.
© Dave Heath
© Dave Heath
© Dave Heath
© Richard HuangAt the end of the exhibition, one wall displayed what appeared to be proof sheets from Heath’s notebooks. They included shooting settings, proposed crops marked out in red, and other details. His care and precision were remarkable.
© Richard Huang
© Richard HuangReflections
I came away from the exhibition with a great deal:
- Heath thought deeply, and his work was all the richer for it.
- His style was unmistakably his own: he turned street photography into street portraiture, bringing the many faces of ordinary life before his lens.
- Heath was a master of the darkroom. His prints have a crisp tonal structure and uncluttered backgrounds.
- He excelled at capturing facial expressions and used gestures and body language to reinforce them.
- In his photographs of several people, the relationships and interactions between them are vividly defined.
- He readily experimented with new visual forms and refused to confine photography to a single frame.
Well, I’ve seen the exhibition. If you didn’t get there in time, my friends, buy the book instead. 😜
© Richard Huang