Bill Dane Pictures …it's not pretty.
50 Years of Photographs I’m still in love
ISBN — 978-0-578-66395-1
Pages — 328
Cover — Hardcover
Size — 245mm x 245mm
Price — 60$ / 500 NOK (+shipping)
Edition of 500 copies
Available through https://billdane.com/buy/book.
You can also buy the book directly from me through danskjaeveland(at)gmail.com (PayPal) or:
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Containing 222 photographs mixed with 100 texts, this self-published, no-frills monograph shows us the world as seen and experienced through Bill Dane's being.
I first saw Bill Dane’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s. It impressed me then and continues to do so all these years later. Dane’s work reminds us of something very basic about this medium. At this point, nearly 200 years after photography’s invention, some might assume that it is “safe,” fully understood, with no remaining surprises. With its almost feral energy and intensity, Dane’s work proves otherwise. His photographs are everything at once: simple and mysterious, innocent and cunning, personal and universal, magical and mundane. They have the effect of a kind of cultural strobe light: individual images are jarringly immediate, the sum total both disorienting and revelatory. Dane makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Vision becomes an act of existential, not merely factual, assertion. I see, therefore I am.
Keith F. Davis, Former senior curator of photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
For several years now, I’ve been jonesing for someone to put together a proper catalog of Bill Dane’s strange and wonderful photographs. That someone turned out to be the man himself (with the help of Dan Skjæveland), which is a real treat because this book is just as wild and unruly and generous as the pictures it contains.
Tim Carpenter, Selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 for photo-eye
Five decades in the making, we are finally delivered a worthy book of words and images by the great American iconoclast, Bill Dane. On this wintry day, I raise a warm glass to our playful destroyer of conditioned seeing. There is kindness in his rage.
Mark Steinmetz
Bill Dane’s pictures stump me, casting a spell that is enigmatic, bizarre and mysterious.
His penetrating vision has powerfully pushed the snapshot aesthetic into new places
revealing an America we would have not seen otherwise and begin to understand..
Thank you Bill.
Jeff Mermelstein
Reintroducing a star from yesteryear is a complicated task. Where does one start? …it’s not pretty tackles everything in one fell swoop. This huge volume includes a quick primer on Dane’s early monochrome years, a selective chronology of highlights since, free-form diaristic chunks of Dane’s life story, and bits and pieces from the art world, showcasing critical reactions and commentary. Such a multitask is probably beyond the scope of any single title, but this one succeeds on a certain level. Its multifaceted form conveys a strong sense of Bill Dane as artist and wonderfully eccentric personality. Dense with information, chaotic, peculiar, and beautiful, the book hews closely to its subject.
Blake Andrews, for Collector Daily
I read, re-read, and re-re-read every word and tried to absorb the pictures…it felt like experiences, words, memories and dreams pulled through my mind-eye with no way to stop it - just organic pulsing resonances with my own experiences….and then on again….
Gus Kayafas
Perhaps if today we exchange photographic prints at a distance without necessarily going through galleries, quotations, increases, and other devilries of the art market, it is also thanks to this possibility of imagination that the avant-gardes have transmitted. Bill Dane proves in unsuspecting times that he understood that we would end up replacing reality with its projection. He had caught the "spectaculative" drift of the world in art, in communication, in politics, and thus in image-making.
Steve Bisson
The photographer embraces, highlights and exaggerates what others may see as photographic missteps or impurities. He in turn creates thoroughly intriguing and beguiling images that defy categorization. Bill Dane refers to "Brain Photography" in one of the book's many texts and refers to himself as "a picture maker". Seeing with the mind and not the eye, combining fogged memories, dreams and reality into singular creations.
Alex Prior
Bill Dane will be noticed by the powers that be in the gallery/museum world by many curators and they will wonder how he slipped from their view.
How is it possible that a unique vision such as Dane’s could have been overlooked?
There really is no one at this point who “sees” the way Bill does with an almost tabula rasa innocence which forces the viewer out of the business as usual sleep time and jolts with a fresh view!
Jack Fischer
I recall hearing about Bill Dane in the 1970s - the photographer who sent his images free to a number of people whose judgement he admired. It seemed somewhat unusual, rather Hippy: now it is what many of us do on Instagram. I see Bill's gesture as belonging to that valuable thing, Gift culture. Later I saw his photographs in magazines and exhibitions and - forty years later - find I never forgot them: images with real poetic content in which we have to invest our minds and feelings.
Finally, this wonderful new book shows that Bill prompted the great John Szarkowski to write some of his very best sentences.
Mark Haworth-Booth, Former senior curator of photography at Victoria & Albert Museum
This book offers great insight into the maturation of America throughout a very difficult time period. Miles Davis, who appears in here, blew his shivers through the universe. Bill Dane does too.
William B. Keckler, writer and visual artist.