The 50,000 item collection documents Gedney's work from the 1950s to 1989. Subjects include photographs of cross country road trips; rural New York; Manhattan; Brooklyn; rural Kentucky; Hippies in San Francisco; composers; gay rallies and demonstrations; St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf; India; England; Ireland; France; and, a large number of nocturnal pictures.
Featured in retrospective exhibition, Short Distances and Definite Places: The Photographs of William Gedney at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), January 20, 2000 - May 16, 2000; Featured in What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, edited by Margaret Sartor, coedited by Geoff Dyer