Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes

Dialogues with Solitudes follows American photographer Dave Heath’s (1931–2016) radical 1965 book A Dialogue with Solitude, which captured the restless zeitgeist of the 1960s like a protest song. Heath depicts the fractures and unease in postwar America’s society of abundance by photographing lived, intimate experience: tension in city streets, close constrained bodies and isolated individuals who have seemingly lost their sense of self.

Influenced by photographers such as W. Eugene Smith, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Heath expresses above all his presence in the world by recognizing an alter ego in others absorbed in inner torment. In Heath’s words: “For me, the act of photographing is no more than making … diaristic notes that come out of engagement with the world. It is in my sequencing of photographs that I create poetic structure, a connective linkage, not chronological or narrative in development such as a photo-essay, but emotional in development.”