By the age of four, Dave Heath had been abandoned by both parents. By fifteen, he had lived in a succession of foster homes and, finally, an orphanage.
 
In 1947 he saw Ralph Crane's photo essay "Bad Boy's Life" in LIFE magazine. Struck by how succinctly the images connected with a deeply felt shared experience, Heath knew he wanted to become a photographer. Using the orphanage's darkroom, he began mastering the medium's mechanics.
 
Working on northeastern US city streets in the early 1960s, Heath captured individual moments in tightly structured compositions charged with his subjects' individuality and the gravity of their circumstances.
 
Discussing his collection of vernacular photographs, Heath said: "When I was twenty-five, I had five photographs from my past: snapshots of myself and my foster family, and one of my mother and father. I tore them up because I wanted to purify myself, to clear that background out of my system. Now I think I shouldn't have done it, because I have collected all these old photographs to replace those five. In a sense, those five have multiplied into thousands. It is like trying to recreate, through these old photographs, a family album of my own for a family I never had. On a simple emotional level, that is my motivation for collecting them. At first there was this intense feeling of trying to rescue from oblivion all these people, all these images of people destined to disappear." —Dave Heath
 
This new book reproduces Heath's original prints, many surviving only as individual working prints, with beautiful accuracy.