From the mid-1950s through the early 1980s, American artist William Gedney photographed everyday people and images throughout regions of the United States, Asia and Europe.

“Short Distances, Definite Places,” a traveling exhibit on display at the Columbus Museum of Art, features 89 of Gedney’s selected photographic works.

Gedney’s work reflects the artistic vision of its remarkably sensitive creator. An extremely private and highly reclusive individual, Gedney was able to unobtrusively submerge himself into the lives of those he photographed. Through these means he was able to capture the true nature and ethereal beauty of his subjects.

“The best moments he captures, although often set in poverty, are those of intimacy and grace,” Curator Margaret Sartor said. “While his camera captures the social environment, Gedney’s truer focus is on the instant and its human face.”

When first invited in 1993 to review Gedney’s photographic archive, Sartor said that she immediately developed a “deep fascination with the sympathetic and sensual view of the world.”

Gedney’s work, which he meticulously catalogued during his career in his personal notebooks and correspondence, was little-known for many years outside his small circle of friends and colleagues.

Following his tragic death in 1989, Gedney left his photographic archive to a few of his fellow photographers, Lee Friedlander and John Szarkowski, who established the William Gedney Photography Library at the Chitrabani Art College in Calcutta, India.

Gedney lived in New York for almost 20 years. As he resided in Brooklyn, he photographed everything from parades, revivals, holiday shoppers and automobile shows to scenes in Washington Market, Times Square, Coney Island and the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1966, Gedney took off across the country to San Francisco with a group of young hippies after he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for the project. He lived with and photographed the misplaced youths in the Haight-Ashbury District of the city, capturing their indolent lifestyles on camera as they moved from one vacant apartment to another. He compiled his photographs and notebooks recording this experience in a book titled “A Time of Youth,” which was never published.

In recollecting this experience, Gedney described these San Francisco hippies as having a “restlessness, and the need to search in forbidden places but always coming back to the self alone.”

Also on display with this exhibition are selections of photographs taken by Gedney during his two trips to eastern Kentucky. These collections, focusing on the Couch and Cornett families, two extended families living in rural Kentucky, have been called some of the most striking and poignant of his career.

The final group of photographs included in this exhibition are derived from Gedney’s first trip to India in 1969. His travels took him through the spectacles of the country’s sacred cities of Benares and Calcutta. While there he kept extensive journals of his impressions of Indian life, based on the reading, research and observation that he did of the culture while living there.

The exhibit opened March 23 and will be running through June 23. The Columbus Museum of Art is located at 480 E. Broad St.