Dave Heath

Heath was born in Philadelphia and grew up there in a series of foster homes. He served in Korea with the United States Army from 1952 to 1954. When he returned, he studied at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1954-55 and at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1954-56, and he supported himself by working in commercial photography studios. By 1959, he was working freelance and studying with the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith at New York's New School for Social Research. In the 1960s, he taught at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. He was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1964, which he used to travel extensively through the United States. After 1969, Heath turned away from making gelatin silver prints and turned to more ambitious, multi-media projects incorporating slides and music, like Grand Album Ordinaire (1973). He immigrated to Canada in 1970 and found work at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, where he taught from 1970 to 1996. In 1975, Heath collaborated on a project with Robert Frank, Robert Heinecken and John Wood and has remained friends with Frank since that time - Frank and his wife June Leaf are the subjects of several of his portraits. Heath continues to live and work in Toronto.

Between 1952 and 1962, Heath made photographs that he would ultimately edit to become A Diaglogue with Solitude. A deeply compassionate body of work consisting of 82 sequenced photographs, it was first exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1963 and published as a book by the same name in 1965, with excerpts from such writers as Rainre Maria Rilke, W.B. Yeats and James Baldwin. In the preface to the book, Heath writes "Disenchantment, strife and anxiety enshroud our times in stygian darkness. Pressed from all sides by the rapid pace of technological progress and increased authoritarian control, many people are caught up in an anguish of alienation. Adrift and without a sense of purpose, they are compelled to engage in a dialogue with the inmost depths of their being in a search for renewal..." While the writing refers to the conditions of the time in general terms, it can also certainly be understood in person ones.

There is an international context for Heath's work in the photographs of artists like Ed van der Elsken, Christer Stromholm, Eikoh Hoseoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Josef Koudelka, Gordon Parks, Minor White, and Robert Frank, to name a few, which can be read as responses to World War II, Korea and Vietname as well as the uncertainties of the Cold War period.