WILLIAM GEDNEY
WILLIAM GEDNEY
IN 1964, William Gedney, a 32-year-old photographer from New York, spent 11 days among the Cornett family of Big Rock, Kentucky. He slept on the floor of the house and documented the family’s domestic rituals, simply and directly. Its matriarch skinning a rabbit in the yard. Its girls larking in the sunlit kitchen. Its men, laid off from the mines, hunkered beneath a truck. As curator John Szarkowski noted in 1968, “Gedney’s pictures make it clear that the individuals are more complex and more interesting than the clichés.”