A facebook post I just happened to find today:
Douglas Nickel said in an interview in PhotoWings in 2007, I believe around the time of former MoMA picture chief John Szarkowski's death, "[...] Bill Dane is not a name that a lot of people will pull out of their hat when describing the most important photographers working today - for reasons that can never be fully explained. He was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. This mechanism was thrown behind him, but John [Szarkowski] is probably right in this regard, the world was not ready for Bill Dane, so it didn't happen."
I think it remains true that the world isn't ready. Biased as I am, when I look at his work I see the most interesting photography I've ever seen, taken as an entire body of work. I've always been a fan of Arbus and the whole hipster cohort of borderline personality photographers from the renaissance (that I assume it was) of camera-ing during mid+ last century. But I get bored really fast. Pictures usually look like trash to me, literally, something that belongs on the sidewalk, melting into the concrete, blowing around in the shitty city breeze. Bill Dane somehow found a fucking way to make the trash beautiful (in my mind).
I think it remains true that the world isn't ready. Biased as I am, when I look at his work I see the most interesting photography I've ever seen, taken as an entire body of work. I've always been a fan of Arbus and the whole hipster cohort of borderline personality photographers from the renaissance (that I assume it was) of camera-ing during mid+ last century. But I get bored really fast. Pictures usually look like trash to me, literally, something that belongs on the sidewalk, melting into the concrete, blowing around in the shitty city breeze. Bill Dane somehow found a fucking way to make the trash beautiful (in my mind).
Look him up. In particular read what John FitzGibbon wrote about him if you happen upon Bill's critics page on his website. Or hell, read what almost anyone wrote.
"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."
===
"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."
===
What?! I should self-diss? Here? In public? Oh dears, no.
Nick, you have always been One Top Perceiver-Digester.
Why would you stumble today!?
Sun OsXs Bill your devoted dad-in-law & love
+:
Thank YOU Monet Os Dad