Donald E. Camp (born 1940
in
Meadville, Pennsylvania
Meadville is a city in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. The population was 13,050 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. The first permanent settlement in Northwestern Pennsylvania, Meadville is withi ...
) is an American
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...
,
photographer
A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who uses a camera to make photographs.
Duties and types of photograp ...
, and
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...
emeritus of
photography
Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...
at
Ursinus College
Ursinus College is a private liberal arts college in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1869 and occupies a campus. Ursinus College's forerunner was the Freeland Seminary founded in 1848. Its $127 million endowment supports about 1, ...
in
Collegeville, Pennsylvania
Collegeville is a borough in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside of Philadelphia on Perkiomen Creek. Collegeville was incorporated in 1896. It is the location of Ursinus College, which opened in 1869. The population was 5,089 ...
. Camp holds both a
Bachelor of Fine Arts
A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) is a standard undergraduate degree for students pursuing a professional education in the visual arts, Fine art, or performing arts. In some instances, it is also called a Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA).
Background ...
and a
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.)
is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admi ...
from
Tyler School of Art
The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is part of Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate st ...
in Philadelphia.
Camp is notable for his
portrait
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better r ...
s that explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in the human face, particularly those of
African American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...
men. Camp's unique printing methods are based on early 19th Century non-silver photographic processes.
Early in his career Camp worked as a photojournalist for the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
The ''Philadelphia Bulletin'' (or ''The Bulletin'' as it was commonly known) was a daily evening newspaper published from 1847 to 1982 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the largest circulation newspaper in Philadelphia for 76 years and was ...
and the Sunday Bulletin. He was a founding member of the
Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists The Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists (PABJ) is an organization formed in June 1974 to advocate for a fair representation of Black journalists in the city’s mainstream media. It was composed of journalists and television and radio stat ...
(PABJ).
In 1990 Camp began his photographic series ''Dust Shaped Hearts'', large photographic prints created with raw earth pigment and casein. The portrait series began with images of Black men and has expanded to include women and other races.
In 1995 Camp was the recipient of a
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 ...
.
His work has been collected by the
Delaware Art Museum
The Delaware Art Museum is an art museum located on the Kentmere Parkway in Wilmington, Delaware, which holds a collection of more than 12,000 objects. The museum was founded in 1912 as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in honor of the arti ...
,
the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American-Art,
The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art,
and the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1805, it is the longest continuously operating art museum and art school in the United States.
The academy's museum ...
.
Donald Camp currently lives and works in Philadelphia.
Camp's work was featured in the 2015 exhibition ''
We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s'' at the
Woodmere Art Museum
Woodmere Art Museum, located in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has a collection of paintings, prints, sculpture and photographs focusing on artists from the Delaware Valley and includes works by Thomas Pollock Anshutz, ...
.
References
External links
virtual exhibition of some of Donald E. Camp's Dust Shaped Hearts seriesincludes video of Camp showing his technique
Review on TheArtBlogDon Camp at the ICADonald Camp at the Coleman Center for the Arts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Camp, Donald
1940 births
Living people
Artists from Philadelphia
American photographers
Temple University Tyler School of Art alumni
Pew Fellows in the Arts
Ursinus College faculty