shashasha

The photobook “One Brief Moment” focuses on Dave Heath’s work from the 1960s, when the artist worked in several cities on the northern East Coast. Previously published only as individual work prints, Heath’s photographs of passers-by, couples, groups and other people he met for a brief moment on the street manage to say things beyond words. With great sensitivity and sincere interest in each of his subjects, Heath seems to connect with the importance of the individual moment he captures.

“In a way it’s like trying to recreate, through these old photographs, a family album of my own for a family I never had. On a simple, kind of emotional level that's my motivation for collecting these photographs. And in the beginning there was all this intense feeling of trying to reclaim from oblivion all these people, all these images of people, which were destined just to disappear.”
― Dave Heath

“[T]o one extent, Dave Heath’s books show street scenes; someone who’s not interested in photography can totally understand these are pictures on the East Coast in 1967. But someone who’s interested in our world can look at them and see unfathomable depths of beauty and sadness.”
― Gregory Barker (of Stanley / Barker, in an interview with Aperture)