Bill Dane, c. 1970
If the lights are on, he's there in spirit even when he's not in body, moving other's minds and spirits around with the ideas implicit in his photographs, which quite often do not actually look like photographs. Often they look like paintings or drawings or collages or readymades. You tend not to want to call Bill Dane a photographer, because he seems much more of a "visual artist." Photography is supposed to be a subset of the "visual arts" and not the other way around. But Bill sort of turns that set theory on its head. He makes no bones about the fact that he considers himself a street photographer foremost, and more is our wonder at the results.
He's recently launched his
new website,, and if you visit I think I can guarantee you'll have fun.
Bill's never hidden his age on his Flickr profile or anywhere else and I found that refreshing and encouraging, because I love seeing artists up there in years (Bill was born in 1938) who are still working, who still clearly "have it" and whose work might be confused with the work of someone very young, not because of any lack of competency, but because of the freshness of ideas and the ability of the work to keep stride with the contemporary--to be the contemporary.
I had no idea of Bill Dane's ridiculously impressive pedigree, and pedigrees don't usually impress me much, because I know so many world-class talents working out there who don't have any pedigree. Bill never felt the need to post any of that on his Flickr profile. He just appeared on the site one day and began interacting in a very generous manner with photographers and other visual artists. What I never did forget from the first time I read his profile was the close to his greeting, which reads, "Good luck for all of us."
That's the sort of thing which stays with one. When you only have a few words to speak to a stranger, those are a pretty choice few words.
And he enables sharing of his work, which is a pretty generous thing to do. I can't count the number of times I've used his work over at
The Visual Virgin and on previous incarnations of this blog.
His site is also a sales gallery and there is a sale on. You aren't going to beat the prices he's offering there, a flat rate (no editions). So if you'd like the sort of art that's not just going to be a great investment, but is also going to be sure to jazz and confuse (in a good way) those folks you allow into your inner sancta, then you're sure to find something great for this or that sanctum in the ole compound. So feel free to make inquiries there about any prints that catch your eye. The work is organized by decade.
I was just looking for stuff for the Tumblr today by Garry Winogrand and here Winogrand comes up in Bill Dane's C.V., right alongside Diane Arbus, who also spoke some nice words about Mr. Dane's work back in the day. He didn't just get a Guggenheim. He's received two. And then match that with a double-scoop of N.E.A. and you can see he maxed out there (that's the new lifetime limit, unless they revised the policy when the Dems got back in).
Check out where all he's collected and the MOMA and SFMOMA connection.
But what comes through Dane's art, first and foremost, is not its ability to attach to or "fit in" to this or that cultural institution. It's the sense that we are looking at a soul constantly on the move, constantly on the open road, and constantly spotting the unreal arrangement amid the the real things (or the real arrangement in the unreal things, if you're a mystic).
In a strange way, I think the majority of the work I know by the artist (and I know the more recent Dane, which is probably a smattering of the whole lens trip) seems to almost present images as aquariums. There's a constant theme of voyeurism. Even with the material goods and shop displays and vintage advertising which probably constitute the majority of his favored subject matter, there's often a confusing sense of what's truly domestic and what's on display, what's for real shelter and what's only play shelter, what's truly vintage and what's anachronism playing vintage. The concept of the simulacrum dominates Dane's recent work. And there's a strong componenent of self-referentiality in the photographs of photographs or of images created with earlier methods of photography or printing methods which have fallen into desuetude. Yet for all of this, the work is never nostalgic. The photographer manages to keep the compositions on point. Nostalgia is rendered meaningless in light of the ability of these symbols, even the discarded ones, to marshal new aesthetic force and to create new disturbances and new pleasure in the mind of the beholder. That many, if not most, of these images have their roots in commercialism lends a strange quality of aesthetic recycling to many of the pieces. Aesthetic recycling is not nostalgia. Dane's aesthetic strategy of restylizing the visual past and finessing new composition out of received composition is closer to Mannerism, but it doesn't quite feel like that either. I want to say his recent work feels more like a phenomenological analysis of the process of image-making.
For me, the big paradigm shift in the avant-garde (in photography and elsewhere) was the shift away from surrealism and towards irrealism. And Bill Dane is definitely an irrealist. It was precisely this deconstruction-through-foregrounding-of-illusion which drew me to his photography when I first encountered it.
Well, visit his Flickr and his website and see for yourself. Form your own views.
(Note: This is a slightly edited version of a 2013 post which I migrated from a blog which is no longer public.)
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