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William Gedney's first trip to India was made possible by a United States government scholarship under the Fulbright program. He arrived in Delhi in November of 1969 with intention of traveling to Calcutta. On the journey cross-country, however, Gedney was stopped short of his proposed destination by the spectacle of Benares, the sacred city by the Ganges and the oldest continually habitated city in the world. He remained in Benares for fourteen months, living and photographing in the old part of the city. While in India, Gedney kept extensive journals, filling pages with transcriptions from his reading and research on Indian life and culture, and his own descriptions of what he saw and experienced. For a time, he also kept a daily diary. When William Gedney returned to Brooklyn, he spent almost two years editing and printing the images made in Benares. In the end, he made hundreds of finished prints. He created two handmade books of the photographs: "Benares Photographs" in 1977 and "First Dummy of Benares Night" in 1982. Ten years after his first trip, Gedney returned to India in 1979 at his own expense and photographed for four months in Calcutta. No monograph of the these photographs was ever published nor were there any major exhibitions of the work during William Gedney's lifetime.

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