One Brief Moment

Dave Heath
One Brief Moment
Photographs: Dave Heath
Publisher: Stanley/Barker
120 pages
Year: 2022
Comments: Softcover, 25 x 20 cm. Black and white portraits.
By the age of four Dave Heath had been abandoned by both of his parents. By the age of fifteen he had lived in a series of foster homes and, finally, in an orphanage.
In 1947, Heath saw Ralph Crane’s photo-essay “Bad Boy’s Life” in LIFE Magazine. Struck by the success of how succinctly these pictures connected to a deeply felt shared experience, Heath knew he wanted to become a photographer. Using the orphanage’s darkroom, he began to master the mechanics of the medium.
In the early 1960s, working in the streets on North Eastern American Cities, Heath used its inhabitants to capture individual moments in tightly structured compositions that are charged with the importance of their individuality and the seriousness of their situation.
On speaking about his collection of vernacular photographs Heath said "When I was 25, I had five photographs from my past, snapshots of myself and my foster family, and one of my mother and father, and I tore them up - because I wanted to purify myself, to cleans the background out of my system. And I think now that I shouldn't have done that, because I’ve collected all these old photographs to replace those five. So in a sense those five have generated themselves into thousands. In a way it’s like trying to recreate, through these old photographs, a family album of my own for a family I never had. On a simple, kind of emotional level that's my motivation for collecting these photographs. And in the beginning there was all this intense feeling of trying to reclaim from oblivion all these people, all these images of people, which were destined just to disappear." - Dave Health
This new book reproduces Heath's original prints, many of which only exist as individual work prints, with beautiful precision.










more books by Dave Heath
more books tagged »stanley/barker« | >> see all
more books tagged »portraits« | >> see all
-
Avedon: Murals and Portraits
by Richard Avedon
sold -
Juvenile
by Osamu Wataya
sold -
Robert Mapplethorpe Kunsthalle Basel
by Robert Mapplethorpe
sold -
Livold family album 1978–1983
by Klavdij Sluban
Euro 35 -
From Back Home
by Collective
sold -
Good Luck Hong Kong (Signed)
by Eric
sold
more books tagged »b&w« | >> see all
-
Jeanne
by Nobuyoshi Araki
sold -
The New West
by Robert Adams
sold -
The Pillar
by Stephen Gill
sold -
Incidents (Sealed copy)
by Henry Wessel
sold -
L'AZOTE (Signed and numbered, edt of 50)
by George Booth Cole
sold -
Smoke (SIGNED)
by Michael Ackerman
sold
more books tagged »dave heath« | >> see all
Books from the Virtual Bookshelf josefchladek.com