"I was looking at a photograph of five men: one older man, likely the father, surrounded by four youths. All were shirtless, underfed, and standing idle in a bleak landscape. Gedney must have stood nearby, not quite among his subjects, but not entirely separate either. His presence was completely unobtrusive. What arrested my attention, though, had little to do with the photographer's distance or the grim details of poverty. This photograph was about the relaxed and natural rhythms of those men's bodies-the drape of bare arms, necks, curved backs in repose, gestures that bespoke their whole lives and their connections. The facts described a hard life and generations of it, but at this moment these men were also, undeniably, beautiful."-Margaret Sartor, What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney

Friday, June 22, 6­8 p.m.

Center for Documentary Studies

A conversation with novelists Allan Gurganus, Joseph Caldwell, and Peter Cameron; art professor Carol Mavor; and editor and curator Margaret Sartor

Looking at the photographs of William Gedney, the beauty of the body is, as Sartor writes, undeniable. If one makes a leap to Gedney's personal life, where, as Sartor notes, "there were lovers, mostly male," it is fitting to consider Gedney's work within the context of his sexuality, his creative vision, and the expressiveness with which he captured his subjects. Within this context, the panelists will examine the multiple layers of aesthetics and sensuality that inhabit Gedney's work.

Participating in the discussion will be a diverse collection of writers, photographers, and critics. Margaret Sartor, the editor of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney and curator of the current CDS exhibit, will begin the panel with a slide presentation of Gedney's work. Joseph Caldwell, a writer and a friend of Gedney, will share his particular personal perspective on the photographer's life and work. Carol Mavor, a professor of art at UNC­Chapel Hill, will take Gedney's work as a point of origin for her comments on homoeroticism and photography. Novelist Peter Cameron will relate photography to the act of writing and also consider Gedney's photographs in the context of contemporary photographers who look at male beauty. Finally, Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, among other books, will emphasize the relationship of Gedney's work to classical art. He will also read from and discuss Gedney's journals. Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, will introduce the panel. A question-and-answer session will follow.

The Panelists

Margaret Sartor is a photographer and a research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies. She is the editor of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney and curator of the current exhibition at CDS, Short Distances and Definite Places: The Photographs of William Gedney. Sartor is also editor of Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Painting of Children by Robert Coles and (with Alex Harris) Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness. Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and The Washington Post Sunday magazine, and they are in many private and museum collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. She was born and raised in Louisiana and now lives with her husband and their two children in Durham.

Joseph Caldwell was born and reared in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but has lived the greater part of his life in New York City. He was educated at Marquette and Columbia universities and did graduate work at the Yale School of Drama, where he twice held the John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting. He has taught at Columbia and New York University and currently conducts a workshop in fiction writing at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Among his plays are The Bridge and Clay for the Statues of Saints-produced at Yale-and Cockeyed Kit, The Downtown Holy Lady, and Jack Fallon, performed Off- and Off-off Broadway. His novels include In Such Dark Places, The Deer at the River, Under the Dog Star, and The Uncle From Rome. His next novel, Bread for the Baker's Child, will be published in January 2002. He was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Institute and the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Carol Mavor is a professor of art at the University of North Carolina­Chapel Hill. She is the author of Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Duke University Press, 1995) and Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Duke University Press, 1999). Her new book project is titled Reading Boyishly.

Peter Cameron is the author of the novels Leap Year, The Weekend, Andorra, and a collection of selected stories, The Half You Don't Know. His new novel, The City of Your Final Destination, will be published in April 2002. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City and teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

"Allan Gurganus writes without a safety net; no precautions are taken against pathos, bathos, authorial indignity," Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed in The Nation. "He locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. Gurganus can do anything he likes as a writer." Gurganus is author of the novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), the collection of stories and novellas White People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist), and the novel Plays Well with Others (Lambda Literary Award finalist). A group of four novellas, The Practical Heart, will be published in September 2001. He has taught at Stanford, Duke, the Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence. Returned from Manhattan to live in his native North Carolina, Gurganus is cofounder of Writers Against Jesse Helms. His next novel is The Erotic History of the Southern Baptist Church.