Walt Whitman Odets

Walt was named by his father — the playwright Clifford Odets — for Walt Whitman, America's greatest poet. His mother was the stage actress Bette Grayson. He was born into one of the great, difficult stories of the American theater, and he was orphaned young: his parents separated when he was two, his mother died when he was seven, and his father died of cancer in 1963, when Walt was sixteen. Both parents gone before he was grown.

After his father's death he went to New York, where he spent part of his adolescence with his legal guardians, Lee and Paula Strasberg — Lee, the legendary teacher of Method acting, had been Clifford's close friend in the Group Theatre. Walt never forgot what it was to be without a home of his own making, and the lesson seems to have taught him something — a way of feeling, quickly and exactly, what another person was carrying.

At twenty-one, Walt took over as literary executor of his father's estate, later giving the Clifford Odets papers to the New York Public Library. The instruction he carried from his father he repeated all his life: the only important thing is to never do anything for money. He obeyed it in every field he entered, none of which he entered to get rich.

He worked only in black and white, for more than forty years — the American social landscape, gas stations and back streets, ordinary people doing little or nothing in ordinary places. He gave weight and dignity to the people the rest of us walk past. His prints entered the Library of Congress, the Oakland Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Yale, and Stanford, and in 2007 he received the James D. Phelan Award in Photography.

He thought hard about what a photograph is, and wrote about it beautifully: that its literalness was its greatest strength, and that a landscape divided by a single tree was joined again only as an idea — a metaphor, he said, for the fundamental isolation of human experience.

Before psychology, there were two decades in the air and on assignment. He joined a San Francisco photojournalists' cooperative at the end of the 1960s and shot for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and others. And he flew — by his own account, a pilot carrying printing plates, bags of canceled checks, and, now and then, a passenger who was no longer living.

He belonged to a small circle of gay pilots in San Francisco who met on Sundays for brunch — and he noticed, quietly, that many of the older ones were HIV-positive, in years when that was unsayable. He carried what he read gently. It was the beginning of his real work.

He was one of the founding, revered voices of the early internet watch world — "the original watch blogger." His essays, written under the title The Horologium, are still read and cited today. A self-taught watchmaker with an almost savant's feel for the most complicated movements, he wrote with wit, exacting standards, and a famous disregard for anything that traded substance for flash.

Jean-Claude Biver is said to have asked, of one of Walt's technical pieces: "He is the only person who understood our movement. The only person. Who is this man?"

His defining work came from listening. As a young clinician in the San Francisco of the mid-1980s, he saw men — many of them not infected — in genuine anguish, and he gave the feeling a name: the "worried well." It was, in the climate of the time, almost a taboo act. His insistence that prevention had to begin with what people actually felt was unwelcome; by 1996 some AIDS organizations would no longer work with him. He kept going anyway, because the men who were hurting mattered more to him than the discomfort of naming their hurt.

His first book, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS (1995), was written for men no one else was speaking for. David L. Kirp, reviewing it in the New York Times, placed it alongside the work of Robert Coles and Robert Jay Lifton — company that defines the highest tradition of compassionate, rigorous witness.

Those were also years of personal loss. His partner, Robb Caramico, died of AIDS in 1992. Walt absorbed it the way he absorbed everything hard in his life — by continuing, and by turning it toward care for others.

Thirty years of practice went into his second book, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives (2019), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which he called his swan song. Benoit Denizet-Lewis reviewed it in the New York Times:

The book's argument was simple and hard-won: that acceptance and progress do not by themselves dissolve shame, and that a good life is built on authentic self-acceptance. He is survived by his companion, Armen Davoudian.