Dave Heath 1931-2016

Photographer and educator Dave Heath passed away yesterday on his 85th birthday. He was my 4th year professor at Ryerson University, and continued as my mentor after that. His advice, both in photography and life, were central to many of my most important decisions.

I interviewed him 20 years ago, and I asked him about teaching photography.

Photography is a glib kind of avocation - I won’t even call it a vocation - in terms of people coming into school to learn it. Often enough I would have students - and I could understand what they were saying - who chose photography because they didn’t have the talent to be a painter or a writer, whatever. Which leaves you to wonder: does it not take talent to be a photographer? Obviously not, in that sense. There’s a certain ease and facility to the medium. Some people go in because it’s “easy." 

The conflict for me with people like that is my seriousness. I dropped out of high school, not to drop out of high school per se, but to become a photographer - even to work in photofinishing. I live and breathe photography - think it, eat it, whatever. It’s life to me. That’s the way any art should be to any artist, whatever the medium is. The true artist is one that makes no distinction or separation about their involvement in a medium. It’s the same way I’m wearing glasses – they are an automatic part of me. 

So the conflict was always there, I was putting demands on people as if they were as serious as I have been over the years and when I was their age. And of course most of them couldn’t meet that.