"It is a continually amazing thing that this impersonal machine, the camera, should render not only the surface of the visible world, but is capable of rendering so sensitively the personality of the photographer." That is the American photographer, William Gedney, writing in one of his homemade notebooks on the work of his great predecessor, the mysterious E.J. Bellocq. Bellocq, of whose life practically nothing is known, left a clutch of superb photographs of prostitutes in the Storyville area of New Orleans taken at the turn of the century, a portfolio which had been rescued from 50 years of oblivion by Gedney's friend, Lee Friedlander.
Gedney, who died from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 56, recognised in Bellocq a fellow spirit, for he too was secretive to the point of invisibility. He spent most of his life in Brooklyn, observing and obsessively photographing the city from the window of his apartment on Myrtle Avenue. In the 1970s, he travelled extensively in the US, bringing back some deeply affecting images from Kentucky, and from among the hippies of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. He went to India, also, where he found a way of life that appealed immediately to his contemplative spirit.
What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney is a fine memorial to this largely unknown artist (although the quality of the prints is not as crisp as it should be). Geoff Dyer provides a sympathetic essay on Gedney and his work, setting him in the company not only of Bellocq, but of such figures as Coleridge and Walter Benjamin - both great starters and bad finishers - of Walt Whitman, Kafka, William Hopper, and that magisterial chronicler of Paris in the Belle Epoque, Eugene Atget. Although Gedney's work comes nowhere near that of Atget, it does have something of the same quality of what might be called mundane mysteriousness which suffuses all of Atget's pictures.
Gedney was a relentless reader who copied into his notebooks all manner of bits and scraps that had caught his attention, from newspaper headlines to passages from Brideshead Revisited and Vladimir Nabokov. The notebook extracts included here reveal, more vividly than any straightforward diary could, something of the inner world of this elusive, hermetic and quietly tormented artist.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times.