Bill Dane (aka Bill Zulpo-Dane, born William Thacher Dane on November 12, 1938) is a

North American North America is a continent in the Northern and Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the sou ...

street photographer Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within Public space, public places. It usually has the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by caref ...

. Dane pioneered a way to subsidize his public by using photographic postcards.Swidler, Ann. Introduction to: ''Bill Dane Photographs Outside and Inside America'', Diputacion Provencial De Granada, Spain, 1993Szarkowski, John - Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil, eds. ''Photography Within the Humanities'', New Hampshire, Addison House, 1977, words: pp.81&85, picture: p.85 He has mailed over 50,000 of his pictures as photo-postcards since 1969.Leger, Marc James
Posting the Personal, Some Thoughts on the Postcard Work of Bill Dane
Visual & Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, New York, 1995Szarkowski, John - "Unfamiliar Places: A Message from Bill Dane," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973Collins, James. ARTFORUM, Review of Bill Dane, 12, #7, March 1974, words: pp.76&77, picture: p.76Green, Jonathan. ''American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present'', New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1984, words: p.180, picture: p.178Edkins, Diana. ''Landscape & Discovery, Hofstra University'', New York, 1973, words: pp.1&3, picture: p.13 As of 2007, Dane's method for making his photographs available shifted from mailing photo-postcards to offering his entire body of work on the internet.A Comprehensive Catalog of Photographer Bill Dane's Work

Education

Dane studied

Political Science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and Power (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...

and

Art Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around ''works'' utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, tec ...

Painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He graduated with a BA in 1964, and a MA in Art/Painting in 1968. Dane painted for seven years before discovering photography in 1969.FitzGibbon, John. Death Valley to Phoenix to Santa Fe and the Sangre De Christo, Hope You Like It,

Aperture In optics, the aperture of an optical system (including a system consisting of a single lens) is the hole or opening that primarily limits light propagated through the system. More specifically, the entrance pupil as the front side image o ...

Magazine 94 (Spring 1984), words: pp.22-25, pictures: pp.23-31 He worked with

Diane Arbus Diane Arbus (; ; March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971
by

and

Lee Friedlander Lee Friedlander (; born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fra ...

Hampshire College Hampshire College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges ...

in the summer of 1971.Bosworth, Patricia. ''Diane Arbus: A Biography'', New York, Knopf, 1984, words: p.304Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts: Notable Past and Present Faculty

Photographic career

Dane was recognized by the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is a private foundation formed in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Gr ...

with

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

s in 1973 and 1982.From www.gf.org
All Guggenheim Fellowships
/ref> He received Fellowships from the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...

in 1976 and 1977.From www.nea.gov
NEA Annual report 1976
an
NEA Annual Report 1978
He used his grants to photograph inside and outside North America. The results of Dane's explorations have been viewed on his photo-postcards, in exhibitions, catalogs, books, magazines, and over the internet. ''Unfamiliar Places: A Message From Bill Dane'' was his seminal exhibit at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

in 1973. While Dane continues as a

straight Straight may refer to: Slang * Straight, slang for heterosexual ** Straight-acting, normal person * Straight, a member of the straight edge subculture Sport and games * Straight, an alternative name for the cross, a type of punch in boxing * Str ...

still photographer A unit still photographer (or simply still photographer) creates still photos specifically for use in publicity and marketing of feature films and television productions. In addition to creating photographs for the promotion of a film, the still ...

working in

public places A public space is a place that is open and accessible to the general public. Roads, pavements, public squares, parks, and beaches are typically considered public space. To a limited extent, government buildings which are open to the public, su ...

, his pictures have evolved dramatically over time.

Collections

Dane's photographs are held in the following permanent public collections: *

Amon Carter Museum The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (also known as the Carter) is located in Fort Worth, Texas, in the city's cultural district. The museum's permanent collection features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading arti ...

, Fort Worth, TX
Amon Carter Museum of American Art- Bill Dane *

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...

, Chicago, IL
Art Institute of Chicago - William Dane *

Bibliothèque Nationale A library is a collection of books, and possibly other materials and media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or digital (soft copies) materials, and may be a p ...

, Paris
Bibliotheque Nationale Paris - Bill Dane *

Fogg Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, Cambridge, MA
Harvard Art Museum - Bill Dane *

Madison Art Center The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. MMoCA is dedicated to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving modern and c ...

, Madison, Wisconsin, WI *

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, New York
The Met - Bill Dane *

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the list of largest art museums, 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 painting ...

, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - William Thacher Dane *

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 5,000 years of history with nearly 80,000 works from six continents. Follo ...

, TX
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - Bill Dane *

Museum of Modern Art, New York The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...

MoMA - Bill Dane *

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

, Washington D.C.
National Gallery of Art, DC - Bill Dane *

Oakland Museum Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...

, Oakland, CA *

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

Libraries, Columbus, OH
OSU Library Catalog - Bill Dane *Provincial Museum,

Granada, Spain Granada ( ; ) is the capital city of the province of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. Granada is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of four rivers, the Darro, the Genil, the Monachil a ...

The Vanguard: " ..and a final part where the authors are best represented within the collection, such as Bill Dane ("Outside and inside America") ..
Granada Today: "Since yesterday, the Palace of the Counts of Gabia has exhibited them along with a hundred snapshots made by top-level artists such as Chema Madoz, Bill Dane, Ouka Leele, Manuel Bello and Angeles Agrela. All of them belong to the photographic collection of the provincial institution and are part of the Showroom exhibition .. *

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

, San Francisco, CA
SFMoMA - Bill Dane *

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

/ National Portrait Gallery Library, Washington, D.C.
Smithsonian Libraries - Bill Dane

Reactions of notable critics

* A. D. Coleman: "Now, if I were a photographer myself, I would be deeply Insulted by this show. I would be insulted that an institution so prestigious and powerful as the Museum of Modern Art would present, as photographically exemplary, 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.""Focus on the Old South," A.D. Coleman, New York Times, December 16, 1973 *

John Szarkowski Thaddeus John Szarkowski (December 18, 1925 – July 7, 2007) was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Early life and ca ...

: "It seems to me that the subject of Bill Dane’s pictures is the discovery of lyric beauty in Oakland, or the discovery of surprise and delight in what we had been told was a wasteland of boredom, the discovery of classical measure in the heart of God’s own junkyard, the discovery of a kind of optimism, still available at least to the eye." *

Patricia Bosworth Patricia Bosworth (née Crum, April 24, 1933 – April 2, 2020) was an American journalist, biographer, memoirist, and actress. She was a faculty member of Columbia University’s school of journalism as well as Barnard College, and was a winne ...

: "In class iane Arbuskept stressing the factual, the literal, the specificity inherent in photography. She loved Bill Dane’s postcard photographs of American landscapes." * Diana Edkins: "The adequacy of meaning lies in what we recognize as the intensity of Dane’s human response." *

Ann Swidler Ann Swidler (born December 11, 1944) is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociol ...

: "A strain of American photography since Robert Frank has concerned itself with finding what is centrally American - attempting the great American novel in visual form." "The greatest American stories, like The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, or Moby Dick, were boys’ stories, written for a culture which didn't want to grow up. Yet in their secret hearts, those stories were about evil and the kind of redemption that might come from confronting its mysteries." "Dane shows us not an exotic heart of darkness, but the American difficulty in dealing with what we cannot understand, own, or control." "Bill Dane's photographs seem to be about foreignness, both here and abroad. But they are really about us as Americans. They ask whether we can learn to love - not because alien worlds accommodate themselves to what we expect, but because we have learned to see even where we cannot understand." *

Jeffrey Fraenkel Jeffrey may refer to: * Jeffrey (name), including a list of people with the name *Jeffrey's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada *Jeffrey City, Wyoming, United States *Jeffrey Street, Sydney, Australia *Jeffreys Bay, Western Cape, South Africa Art ...

: "'What’s that?' is not an uncommon response for viewers confronting one of Bill Dane’s photographs. This is a curious question, given the fact that Dane approaches the 'real world' with his camera as squarely as Atget, Evans, or Friedlander. He photographs what exists, with no manipulation or fabrication."Fraenkel, Jeffrey. ''Bill Dane's History of the Universe'', San Francisco, Fraenkel Gallery, 1992, words: p.Introduction, pictures: pp.1-25 * Sandra S. Phillips: "The vision of the world of Bill Dane, both inside and outside America, is often downright funny. But often, it is also a tragic vision. In his photographs are voltages, a disturbing strangeness."Phillips, Sandra - Yolanda Romero Gomez, Comisaria. "Coleccion Deputacion De Granada," Diputacion Provencial De Granada, Spain, 1995, words: pp.60-61, picture: p.63 * Bill Berkson: "Dane has cast himself as a surveyor of ceremonies stuck deep in our wishful, ornamental glut, our fuss."Berkson, Bill. ARTFORUM, Review of Bill Dane, 25 # 3, November 1986, words: pp.143-144, picture: p.144

References

External links

* * Dane's seminal show at MoMA
Unfamiliar Places: A Message From Bill Dane

An Interview with Dane
by

Elliott Linwood Elliott Linwood (born July 14, 1956) is an Americans, American conceptual artist known for his large-scale photo grids and cross-referencing sculptural installations. He is based in San Diego, San Diego, California. Early life, career and educat ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dane, Bill 1938 births Living people American photographers Postcard publishers University of California, Berkeley alumni Place of birth missing (living people)