Bill
. . . Also I will enclose my book, Doodling on the Titanic: the Making of Art in a World on the Brink. I’m not sure whether it ever came to your attention. I’m hoping you will at least find the chapters about Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Art in The Age Of Melting Glaciers, and Art in  the Age of Genetic Modification interesting. When I think about your work I think about it in terms of some of the ideas in those chapters.
There is so much about your work that invites interpretation. Rivers of words could be written about it. And some have, although the ones I’ve waded in, don’t seem to me to do you justice. Your work may invite interpretation, but is also allusive and slippery. It evades as much as it invites. Nice going,  Bill. And I can’t resist adding my two cents (this is also partly why it’s taken a while to get back to you):
What I see in your work is this: I see reflections of reflections, representations of representations, in which “the real” has no primacy or rather is not privileged over the image. The fact is that our experience of “the real” is largely an experience of images, and therefore is fragmented and incoherent. To use the term that Walter Benjamin uses in his essay,  “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” – look at me, getting all fancy quoting Walter Benjamin – what is lost is the “aura” of the original, it’s privileging as against the reproduction. Benjamin was talking about the “original” work of art, but I think the same is true of the “aura” of immediate unmediated experience. If it’s not reproduced in some way it seems less real, and the images seem realer than whatever it is they are the images of. (Even in the early black and white (or rather tones of gray) photographs of, or example, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia or the pyramids of Egypt, you strip the famous tourist attractions of their “aura,” so they lose all pretense of being in any way more deserving of attention than any random thing one might choose to look at.
It seems you set yourself the task of paying attention to the random, the overlooked. all that we dismiss as not worthy of our attention. And what you reveal is mystery. For multiplying reproductions and reflections, weirdly degraded and distorted are in fact mysterious – what strange alchemy produced them? What path did they travel? What tales do they tell? And what you find as well as these multiplying reproductions is composition, pattern, colors that could be appreciated as “abstractions,” but your “abstract” compositions never allow us to forget the unsung, unheroic reality on which they are based and to which they remain  tethered.
t seems to me this is what, intentionally, unintentionally, instinctively or with premeditation your work is “about,” although art is never “about” anything but itself.
Which brings me to what I think is an interesting paradox. In your photographs, original, unmediated experience has been replaced by its mediations, reproductions of reproductions. But you, the photographer are recording an unmediated experience of those layers of mediation. And each of your photographs is an “original – a “Bill Dane.”  You could sign it on the back. And it is important that a Bill Dane photograph has an “aura, ” and the bigger the aura the better, because that’s how Bill Dane gets a reputation as an “important” photographer, gets exhibits in prestigious galleries, even at the holy of holies, the Temple Mount of art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that’s how Bill Dane gets Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and that’s how he makes – hopefully – money.
It looks like that was the path that you were on, and then – fame is fickle – the path seemed to peter out.  As it says on page 322 of your book, “Bill’s work started disappearing from the gallery walls and institutions and photo public moved on to other work.” I wish it had not been so, and who knows,  history may yet reward you, like so many who did not get the full measure of appreciation they deserved in their lifetime. But there is another way to look at it: Which is that ironically, the destruction of the aura of the real that your work memorializes now extends itself to the memorials you have created in your work. Without all that fancy scaffolding of fame and attention, your work loses its aura. Maybe people no longer pay it the attention it used to get. Maybe, just like what you photograph, your photographs are now neglected and overlooked. But nothing has changed. They are as valuable as they ever were. You began by mailing out thousands of free postcards. Now towards the end of a journey, you give away free copies of your book.
Okay. I’m done.
Osha Neumann email w permission 2022

Osha Bill
your words float overhead
It took me 4 years to find my mundanes
The fact is and always has been:
I walk and hunt for treasure unknown... with my history intuition
Instinct and soul engaged focused
Hoping to be grabbed by never-seen-by-me-before stuff
No theories... just a minds-on guy
But but I love and appreciate others' reactions!
These are the facts-fictions of life-viewings = you are right
Et ceteras
Os Bill