But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet. …

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

William Gedney proved Henry Miller wrong.

From a window overlooking the Myrtle Avenue El, Mr. Gedney spun an urban narrative of surprising intimacy. Working within the confines of an unchanging frame — a handful of storefronts and the sidewalk to the subway platform — he caught fleeting moments of grace, joy, melancholy and humor.

“He was thinking on so many different levels,” said Margaret Sartor, who edited “What Was True,” a monograph of his work. “He was a really smart photographer who was interested in pushing the uses of the camera and the relationship between the viewer and the picture.”

Like in his other work, she said, he was close, yet unobtrusive, neither disrupting the moment nor making “art” from a scene. In some ways, his observations from his apartment in Brooklyn were reminiscent of a young Martin Scorsese, who as an asthmatic child would spend hours peering from his apartment down to the streets of Little Italy in Manhattan.

“The city allowed Bill to watch and observe and be part of life without having to interact with it,” Ms. Sartor said of Mr. Gedney. “The window is an extension of that. He’s on one side, and the world is on the other. His point of view was a combination of seeing this intimately, yet outside of the picture. He’s not part of it, but he’s not too far away.”

William Gedney

He started the Myrtle Avenue series in 1969, when he learned the city planned to demolish the elevated line that ran past his window. It was a fitting response from a prolific — if relatively unknown — photographer who had moved to Brooklyn in the early 1950s to study at the Pratt Institute.

“In all of Gedney’s work there is that relationship to time and loss,” said Ms. Sartor, who teaches at Duke University, which houses his archives (and which scanned and printed several of the images of the street during and after the El’s demolition). “We sense that not just in his Myrtle Avenue work, but in his pictures of people on the street or sitting in cars. He was always aware of this very beautiful moment, this complicated human moment, and that it was to be lost.”

The Myrtle Avenue series was done at a time when Mr. Gedney, who died in 1989, had been given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art. The show featured some of his work from Kentucky and San Francisco. Despite the support of John Szarkowski, and the encouragement of his friend Lee Friedlander, his work did not reach a wider audience.

“He was such a sensitive, observant person, but he really did not have the skills to market himself,” Ms. Sartor said. “He did not have the interest to participate in that world of galleries. So he just continued to work and it did not get seen much.”

He taught at various colleges and continued to take photographs, as well as compile volumes of quotations and observations in handmade notebooks. The two journals he made on Myrtle Avenue are a fascinating blend of literature, philosophy, history, urban planning and news items. They portray a voracious reader who was keenly interested in the city and the street, even as he kept a distance.

“He wasn’t just a watcher, he was interested in all the ways you could describe something,” Ms. Sartor said. “He was a wonderful writer because he understood the power of description. He didn’t analyze things he was looking at. He just described the details of the city. It’s so hard to let the details tell the story.”

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