Bill Dane Pictures …it’s not pretty.
50 Years of Photographs I’m still in love
Managed with Dan Skjæveland

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Karin Bareman

By simply glancing at the pictures and scanning the accompanying texts, you can generally ‘get’ the subject matter of most photo books, even if you return to them at a later date and discover unexpected hidden depths. Not so with the recent publication of Bill Dane’s work. For this is no ordinary photo book.

Steve Bisson

Perhaps if today we exchange photographic prints at a distance without necessarily going through galleries, quotations, increases, and other devilries of the art market, it is also thanks to this possibility of imagination that the avant-gardes have transmitted. Bill Dane proves in unsuspecting times that he understood that we would end up replacing reality with its projection. He had caught the "spectaculative" drift of the world in art, in communication, in politics, and thus in image-making.

Tim Carpenter Best Book of 2020 photo-eye Santa Fe, with honorable mentions from Jeff Mermelstein and Mark Steinmetz⁣

[Bill Dane could be called] a photographer’s photographer: affirmative meaning lies in the pictures (in the seeing), and not in anything external to them – a stance not much in vogue these days.

Tom Garver

[This is] a remarkable piece of work, and could only have been self-produced because no trade book publisher would have touched it in its present form. That’s okay, and more than okay. It’s been done the way [Bill] wanted it to be.

Blake Andrews

One gets the sense of a restless, tireless explorer, continually exploring new motifs, and refusing any obvious tropes. The photographs are so delightfully varied that it’s hard to connect them stylistically or assign them to a single author. Their flippancy gave some fits, as exemplified by AD Coleman’s snarling review in 1973: “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.” Even Szarkowski was left tongue-tied trying to give them coherence:  “the discovery of classical measure in the heart of God’s own junkyard, the discovery of a kind of optimism, still available at least in the eye.”

Thomas Hawk

His view of the world, as his book title admits, is not always pretty, but it is like no other photographer you’ve probably ever seen.  It’s not easy work to get through but it’s rewarding when you do.

Marc James Léger

The double blackmail of psychological torment and industrialized consumerism, of prejudice and democracy,
is the motif of Bill Dane’s adventures in funk photography, mail art and social media. This existential no exit
participates in an American variant of social realism, from Edith Wharton to Lee Friedlander, and in the poetic
bathos of everyday life, from William Faulkner and Robert Rauschenberg to Alice Walker and Boots Riley.

Keith F. Davis

I first saw Bill Dane’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s. It impressed me then and continues to do so all these years later. Dane’s work reminds us of something very basic about this medium. At this point, nearly 200 years after photography’s invention, some might assume that it is “safe,” fully understood, with no remaining surprises. With its almost feral energy and intensity, Dane’s work proves otherwise. His photographs are everything at once: simple and mysterious, innocent and cunning, personal and universal, magical and mundane. They have the effect of a kind of cultural strobe light: individual images are jarringly immediate, the sum total both disorienting and revelatory. Dane makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Vision becomes an act of existential, not merely factual, assertion. I see, therefore I am.

Mark Haworth-Booth​

I recall hearing about Bill Dane in the 1970s - the photographer who sent his images free to a number of people whose judgement he admired. It seemed somewhat unusual, rather Hippy: now it is what many of us do on Instagram. I see Bill's gesture as belonging to that valuable thing, Gift culture. Later I saw his photographs in magazines and exhibitions and - forty years later - find I never forgot them: images with real poetic content in which we have to invest our minds and feelings.
Finally, this wonderful new book shows that Bill prompted the great John Szarkowski to write some of his very best sentences.​

Mark Steinmetz

Five decades in the making, we are finally delivered a worthy book of words and images by the great American iconoclast, Bill Dane. On this wintry day, I raise a warm glass to our playful destroyer of conditioned seeing. There is kindness in his rage.

Gus Kayafas

I read, re-read, and re-re-read every word and tried to absorb the pictures…it felt like experiences, words, memories and dreams pulled through my mind-eye with no way to stop it - just organic pulsing resonances with my own experiences….and then on again….

Jeff Mermelstein

Bill Dane’s pictures stump me, casting a spell that is enigmatic, bizarre and mysterious.
His penetrating vision has powerfully pushed the snapshot aesthetic into new places
revealing an America we would have not seen otherwise and begin to understand..
Thank you Bill.

William B. Keckler

Bill Dane is one of a minuscule number of photographers to have had a solo show at MOMA (1973). Dane was a huge part of the postcard art scene starting back in the sixties and estimates he mailed over 69,000 photographic postcards. He's always called himself a street photographer, but I would call him a street photographer with a strong metaphysical bent. He loved crafting images of images, early on, often ephemera and cultural detritus that would soon disappear, reframing these strange visual narratives that sought to sell us something or sell us on something. I'm fairly certain he did this before that became a vogue with artists like Richard Prince. In other words, he was early in on the postmodern shift.
Dane has been an advocate for the oppressed for the entirety of his career. This book includes text written by the photographer that documents that struggle year by year. And you get to meet many of his celebrated colleagues along the way.
I first met Dane a number of years ago and have appreciated his art and friendship equally since then. I'm happy to have been able to contribute some words on Bill's important art to this book. And I'm happy to have exhibited my artwork alongside his, thanks to his generosity and friendship.
I'll defer to Blake Andrews writing in Collector Daily for a better description of the contents of the book…