A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966–1967

by William Gedney
edited by Lisa McCarty

Duke University Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-1-4780-1055-5

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK
A year before 1967's famed Summer of Love, documentary photographer William Gedney set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.” A Time of Youth brings together eighty-seven of the more than two thousand photographs Gedney took in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967. In these photographs Gedney documents the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Gedney lived among these young people in their communal homes, where he captured the intimate and varied contours of everyday life: solitude and companionship, joyous celebration and somber quiet, cramped rooms and spacious parks, recreation and contemplation. In these images Gedney presents a portrait of a San Francisco counterculture that complicates popular depictions of late 1960s youth as carefree flower children. The book also includes facsimiles of handwritten descriptions of the scenes Gedney photographed, his thoughts on organizing the book, and other ephemera.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
William Gedney (1932–1989) was an American documentary photographer. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Pratt Institute; and CSMVS, Mumbai, among other museums. He designed and created mock-ups for seven books of his photography; A Time of Youth is the first of these to be published.

Lisa McCarty is Assistant Professor of Photography at Southern Methodist University, author of Transcendental Concord, and coauthor of William Gedney: Only the Lonely 1955–1984.

Philip Gefter is a photography critic and author of What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon, Wagstaff: Before and after Mapplethorpe: A Biography, and Photography after Frank.

REVIEWS

“William Gedney was a great photographer, and the work he made in San Francisco is among his best. It amounts to a kind of visual archaeology whereby the documentary record is unearthed from the psychedelic aesthetic and glow in which it has been preserved. Here is the shuffle and trudge of life, the gray dawn that precedes the cosmic awakening of the Summer of Love. And yet: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn . . .’”

-- Geoff Dyer

“William Gedney had the great insight to be in San Francisco at the height of the hippie culture of the 1960s. His elegant photographs document their lives and circumstances with sympathy and grace. They are important pictures, made by an artist whose work deserves to be more widely known.”

-- Sandra Phillips, Curator Emerita of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

"The impulse to capture the ephemerality of youth and beauty is what gives this collection its melancholy sweetness. It’s also a reflection of Gedney’s own San Francisco story. . . . [H]is critical, empathic gaze helps complete a more human picture of the most tumultuous and most stereotyped moment in San Francisco history."

-- Benjamin Schneider SF Weekly

"A Time of Youth is a love letter–as ardent as it is conflicted . . . full of telling moments. . . ."

-- Vince Aletti Vogue Italia

"The sequence of 89 photographs Gedney presents an unvarnished look at the strangely bitter seeds of hippie life before they blossomed into 'flower power.' Without the benefit of rose-colored glasses or psychedelic acid trips promulgated by Hollywood, we witness a group of radicals who made the choice to 'turn on, tune in, drop out' as writer Timothy Leary would later exhort at the 'Human Be-In.'”

-- Miss Rosen Blind

"A marvelous piece of archival retrieval and reconstruction."

-- Richard B. Woodward Collector Daily

"The overdue arrival of this Gedney book is also a testament to the artist’s faith in the longevity of his work and the degree of sacrifice he undertook to protect it. . . . A Time of Youth offers the first opportunity to see his long-form work close to the way he conceived of it—as a dramatic narrative formed almost entirely by the pictures."

-- Rebecca Bengal Aperture

"A Time of Youth offers another glimpse into Gedney’s work, and a unique window into the counterculture of San Francisco in the late 1960s."

-- Brian Arnold C4 Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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