Untitled

Using a 35 mm Leica camera and traveling by motorcycle, George Gardner set out to document the America of the 1960s and 1970s, creating wryly observed portraits of everything from responses to the Vietnam War to the role of guns and Bibles. These photographs were collected in his 1982 monograph, America Illustrated. A more intimate moment—an almost sculptural treatment of a sleeping man—can be seen in this early photograph, made while Gardner was studying anthropology at the University of Missouri. Hugh Edwards gave the young photographer crucial early support, acquiring this and nine other photographs in 1968.