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
Dan Skjæveland
cousin Joe says your now famous fantastic guy is Knausgaard
so why did he move to Sweden
will you move
I'd like to move along a sidewalk
li’lbilly dont complain
i sat for 6 book+ years
xrays:
nothing weird
arthritic wear
no structural damage to hip replacements
spine = arthritic wear some compression & slips of discs nothing 83 unusual
I have spasms inflammations = exercise ice advil
now going to PT w diagnosis in working hands!
Go Slow
Sorry to Bother You
billdane.com
! Grateful Nancy and I
We paid back our $13k publishing loan with sales
I return to loved free-sharing:
Please see all my books here at FreeReadPress created by Joseph A. Dane
Os Bill
+: Books are still for sale at photo-eye and billdane.com
o dears…
OsXs
look at us
we are almost all still here
so much water under
you show up in dreams
and stuff real close
it even looks like Esther will nurse at camp and Romy will go
who is Esther Romy Monet Meg David Moses
who are we today
this is no way to tell
billdane.com
WilliamThacherDane
Wicked white-supremacy
Savage capitalism
When BLACK LIVES MATTER all lives will
Planet survival = eco democratic socialism
we went to the cousins’ 1938 wood rincon point beach house
it was full family beach weather and buttons
meNancy MonetNickRomy EstherJeremias MosesKatelyn
you can imagine
Welcome again to art!
If you are not here, what is the point?
Dan Skjæveland's photographs can be viewed and placed in our very short history of photography.
The first camera-photograph was taken in 1826.
Dan will likely include Eugene Atget, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand among his inspirers.
You, here and now, have all the context needed - your history - head, heart, and soul.
You have all the tools necessary for experiencing.
Some of Dan's pictures can feel like puzzles we are not equipped to solve.
No!
This is not a test!
We will all have our valid, personal reactions to the arts, and these pictures.
These are visual poems hunted and gathered in our places of public humanity.
Pictures created in a union of the common, the Skjæveland, and the camera-machine.
We are here as the expected collaborators in the experience.
I will take my time - I will chew with the patience of monks.
Bill Dane, 2019
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
sorry Dan
you cant read nearest truth in flight ole brad f baby apparently misplaced my thing
n now WAR
i'm lucky living
What would I do?!
What will the capitalist suits do?!
Another hitler is right there-here
They are everywhere . . .
Before I decided on an encyclopedia for the island
I thought maybe some holy book some anthology
Today it’s Tommy Orange’s There There
I do have seven -7- books = FREE at FreeReadPress
Yes self-consciously i give you William Keckler’s https://icestationpoetry.medium.com/photographer-bill-danes-website-ed7a9a5021f1
If you wanna fuck with me you’re gonna have to follow directions…
THANKYOU JRW! Dont ever even spec that i could diss The Flickr ...
o no - gives me life since '08 ... inspiration.
I simply could not do called-for-justice to Others = Respond - I would never float to the top.
Touch n move.
Just finished "The Road To Los Angeles" & "Ask The Dust" = worth the wait...
i will use this walker until...
You look fuckin' swashbuckling Joe oohh look down on us mutha dane...
I just mailed you 2 copies of the 5 books
so you can see what we did w amazon
I "unpublished" them at KDP they're still hanging in a-zon limbo
N95 !
Just one person-of-difference at tables changes dynamics = Charis Do Good li'lbilly tries too