Bill Dane William Thacher Dane 1938 Sierra Madre, California

PlanetWTF?!  on course... so: billdane.com

Education

• Art/Photo Teacher, Berkeley Public Schools, Berkeley High School 1966-1998

• Hampshire College, Workshops with Arbus & Friedlander 1971

• University of California, Berkeley, M.A. Painting 1968

• University of California, Berkeley, Teaching Credential 1966

• University of California, Berkeley, B.A. Art/Political Science 1964

• Pasadena City College, A.A. 1961

• U.S. Army Language School, Monterey, Russian 1958, Germany 1959-1960

• Pasadena High School, Pasadena, CA 1956

• Midland School, Los Olivos, CA 1955

Fellowships

• 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship

• 1977 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

• 1976 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

• 1973 Guggenheim Fellowship

Solo Shows

• 2007 thru today at billdane.com, Albany, CA

• 2014 Haverford College, Haverford, PA

• 2008 Four Walls Gallery, San Diego, CA

• 2008 Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY

• 2006 Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 2005 In Color 2, San Francisco, CA

• 2003 Provincial Museum, Gigon, Spain

• 2002 Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

• 1993 Provincial Museum of Granada, Granada, Spain

• 1992 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1989 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

• 1987 Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

• 1986 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1984 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1983 Robert Freidus Gallery, New York, NY

• 1982 De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA

• 1981 Madison Art Center, Madison, WI

• 1981 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1977 M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA

• 1976 Museum of Art, Washington State University, Pullman, WA

• 1976 Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

• 1975 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard U., Cambridge, MA

• 1974 Oakland Museum, “Bill Dane Photo-Postcards”, Oakland, CA

• 1973 Museum of Modern Art, "A Message From Bill Dane", New York, NY

• 1970 Reese Palley Gallery San Francisco, CA, painting-sculpture-photos (all burned up)

Group Shows

• 2023 Raw Art Collective, COVERT PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW, Port Townsend, Washington

• 2022 Torrance Art Museum, “LYNCHLAND”, Curators Tom Dunn and Steven Wolkoff, CA

• 2020 Galleri ni, Bryne, Norway

• 2018 Palacio Condes de Gabia, Diputación de Granada, Granada, Spain

• 2017 Galleri Blunk, "Outsidere," Trondheim, Norway

• 2014 New York Public Library, "Public Eye: 175 Years Of Sharing Photography," NY

• 2014 Galerie Rudolfinum, "Only The Good Ones: The Snapshot Aesthetic Revisited", Prague

• 2013 Northumbria University, "Uncle Vern's Dog," Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

• 2012 Drkrm Gallery, "Camera Night At The Ivar," Los Angeles, CA

• 2011 Tate Modern, UK and San Francisco MoMA, "Exposed," Simon Baker & Sandra Phillips

• 2010 The Getty, "Engaged Observers," Los Angeles, CA

• 2010 The Getty, "In Focus: Tasteful Pictures," Los Angeles, CA

• 2008 Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

• 2007 Four Walls Gallery, San Diego, CA

• 2005 Prentice & Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco MoMA, CA

• 2001 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 2000 Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

• 1997 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

• 1997 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1996 San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

• 1996 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1993 Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1993 Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA

• 1991 Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1991 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1990 Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA

• 1990 Velick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1989 Turin International Photography Biennial, Turin, Italy

• 1986 The Photographer's Gallery, London, UK

• 1985 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA

• 1985 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

• 1985 Barbican Gallery, London, UK

• 1984 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1981 "American Landscapes", MoMA, NY

• 1981 "Robert Frank: Forward," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1980 "Photography And Architecture," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA

• 1978 "Mirrors And Windows", Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

• 1977 The Photographer's Gallery, London, UK

• 1975 Edinburgh Art Center, "Recent American Still Photography," Scotland

• 1974 California State University at Sacramento, CA

• 1973 Hofstra University Museum, Diana Edkins, Hempstead, New York, NY

Collections

• Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX

• Art Institute of Chicago, IL

• Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France

• Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY

• Consolidated Freightways, Palo Alto, CA

• Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, CA

• Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

• Madison Art Center, Madison, WI

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

• Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA

• Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, OH

• Pamela K. Bonino, San Francisco, CA

• Provincial Museum, Granada, Spain

• Rene di Rosa, Napa, CA

• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA

• Smithsonian American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery Library, Washington, D.C.

Quotations

• "Now, if I were a photographer myself, I would be deeply Insulted by this show. I would be insulted that an institution so prestigious and powerful as the Museum of Modern Art would present, as photographically exemplary, a collection of random snapshots by someone who has not even established enough craft competence to make his disregard of craft standards a significant esthetic choice." -A.D. Coleman
  

• "This is not only excellent work but also among the most important current photography I've seen ..." -Ben Lifson
  

• "It seems to me that the subject of Bill Dane’s pictures is the discovery of lyric beauty in Oakland, or the discovery of surprise and delight in what we had been told was a wasteland of boredom, the discovery of classical measure in the heart of God’s own junkyard, the discovery of a kind of optimism, still available at least to the eye." -John Szarkowski
  

• "In class [Diane Arbus] kept stressing the factual, the literal, the specificity inherent in photography. She loved Bill Dane’s postcard photographs of American landscapes." -Patricia Bosworth
  

• "The adequacy of meaning lies in what we recognize as the intensity of Dane’s human response." -Diana Edkins
  

• "A strain of American photography since Robert Frank has concerned itself with finding what is centrally American - attempting the great American novel in visual form." "The greatest American stories, like The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, or Moby Dick, were boys’ stories, written for a culture which didn’t want to grow up. Yet in their secret hearts, those stories were about evil and the kind of redemption that might come from confronting its mysteries." "Dane shows us not an exotic heart of darkness, but the American difficulty in dealing with what we cannot understand, own, or control." "Bill Dane's photographs seem to be about foreignness, both here and abroad. But they are really about us as Americans. They ask whether we can learn to love - not because alien worlds accommodate themselves to what we expect, but because we have learned to see even where we cannot understand." -Ann Swidler
  

• "'What’s that?' is not an uncommon response for viewers confronting one of Bill Dane’s photographs. This is a curious question, given the fact that Dane approaches the 'real world' with his camera as squarely as Atget, Evans, or Friedlander. He photographs what exists, with no manipulation or fabrication." -Jeffrey Fraenkel
  

• "The vision of the world of Bill Dane, both inside and outside America, is often downright funny. But often, it is also a tragic vision. In his photographs are voltages, a disturbing strangeness." -Sandra Phillips
  

• "Dane has cast himself as a surveyor of ceremonies stuck deep in our wishful, ornamental glut, our fuss." -Bill Berkson
  

• "Just about all the really important awards that can come to a photographer have been Bill Dane's, most of them more than once. A favorite of Diane Arbus, a principal inheritor of the traditions of his friend Garry Winogrand and of Robert Frank, Dane is still mostly unhonored in their and his country - a situation he faces with humor, a staple of his art and personality. Dane's is an epic vision and a comic, and if there is such a genre as epic-comedy then Dane is Prince of it. He is an absolute master of visual contretemps; a sharp awareness of the absurdities of Nature-once-removed (as in dioramas and the like). If, as I am comfortable in prognosticating, historians look back on the last 35 years of our millennium as an unparalleled time of gross self-congratulatory corniness of taste, national bombast, and hapless credulity, Bill Dane will be singled out as a chief recorder. Not the least charm of his procedure is that Bill does it all with a completely straight face." -John Fitz Gibbon
  

• "Even though most people still don't seem to understand how manipulative photography is - how it changes experience - if it didn't, it wouldn't be so magical. A clue as to why photography is so wonderful is that it does its own thing; it creates a new reality." -Bill Dane
  

• "I walk into the street to take pictures, looking at everything. I'm amazed by all kinds of street visions. I'm engaged by all kinds of things - peoples' faces especially. But, it turns out, I can only take pictures of very particular scenes. It's been this way from day one. I'm aware of all kinds of possible subject matter but, it's impossible for me to photograph unless I have the 'possible-picture-connect'. I walk along with my psyche and collected history, scanning-hunting." -Bill Dane
  

• "The first fire in 1969 left me with a leather jacket, cowboy boots, a black hat and an old camera." -Bill Dane

• Wikipedia
  
  

Publications

• Dane, Bill. "Bill Dane Pictures  ...it's not pretty - 50 Years of Photographs   I'm still in love", self-published, Albany, CA 2020

• Dane, Bill: Pictures, Katherine Mills: design, Gary Bogus: binding. "Little Known", handmade book, Albany, CA 1983

• Edkins, Diana, Hofstra University Museum, Diana Edkins, Hempstead, New York, 1973

• Gollonet, Carlos, Coordina. Catalog to accompany the exhibition, "Bill Dane Photographs Outside and Inside America", Diputacion Provencial De Granada, Spain and the Fraenkel Gallery, 1993

• Di Rosa, Rene. "Local Color", Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1999, words: p.10, words and picture: pp.82–83

• Fitz Gibbon, John. "California A-Z And Return", The Butler Institute, Youngstown, Ohio, 1990, words and picture: p.12

• Graphis Press, Robert Delpire Introduction. Fine Art Photography ‘95, Graphis Publishing, Zurich, Switzerland, 1995, picture: p.79

• Galassi, Peter. "Walker Evans & Company", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2000, picture: p.195

• Gomez, Yolanda Romero, Coordina. Exhibit: "Bill Dane Photographs Outside and Inside America", Diputacion Provencial De Granada, Spain, 1993

• Green, Jonathan. "The Snapshot", New York, Aperture Foundation, 1974, pictures: pp.96–105

• Harris, Melissa, Ed. Aperture, #124, Collection of Joshua P. Smith, Summer 1991, picture: p.32

• Heyman, Therese. "Slices Of Time: California Landscapes 1860-1980", Oakland, Oakland Museum, 1981, picture: p.21

• Kismaric, Carol, Aperture, #94, “Death Valley to Phoenix to Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo . . . Hope You Like It”, John Fitzgibbon, New York, NY

• Leger, Marc James. "The Idea Of The Avant Garde - And What It Means Today", Manchester University Press, 2014, picture: last page!

• Munsterberg, Marjorie. Calendar, "On Time", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1974, pictures: week of Aug 25

• Noble, Alexandra and Nigel Barley, et al. "The Animal In Photography 1843-1985", The Photographer's Gallery, London, 1986, picture: p.9

• Osman, Colin and Peter Turner. Creative Camera, Sept. 1976, pictures: pp.308–311

• Phillips, Sandra. "Crossing The Frontier: Photographs Of The Developing West, 1849 To The Present", San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Chronicle Books, San Francisco 1996, picture: p.103

• Phillips, Sandra. John Szarkowski: "Photographs", San Francisco Museum of Mordern Art with Bulfinch Press, 2005 P.136

• Phillips, Sandra. "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, And The Camera Since 1870", San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Yale University Press, 2010, words: p.23, picture: p.30

• Rubinfien, Leo. "Love/Hate Relations", Review of Work by Tod Papageorge and Bill Dane, Artforum, NY, Vol. 26, #10, Summer 1978, words: pp.46–51, pictures: pp.46,50,51

• Rubinfien, Leo, Creative Camera, "Recent American Photography", London, UK, 1976

• Silverman, Ruth. "Athletes", New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, picture: p.123

• Silverman, Ruth. "Dog Days", San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1989, picture: week of Aug 8

• Silverman, Ruth. "The Dog", San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2000, picture: p.79

• Silverman, Ruth. "San Francisco Observed", San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1986, picture: p.116

• Szarkowski, John. "American Landscapes", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981, picture: p.72

• Szarkowski, John. "Mirrors And Windows", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1978, pictures: pp.122–123

• Turner, Peter, Ed. "American Images: Photography 1945-1980", London, Penguin Books/Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, words-picture: 9.162

• Velick, Bruce. "A Kiss Is Just A Kiss", Crown Publishers, N.Y. 1990, picture: p.38