McCormack, Dan Photographie [USA]

I began studying Photography around 1965 at the Institute of Design in Chicago. My studies with Aaron Siskind, Joe Jachna, Arthur Siegal and Wynn Bullock gave me first hand experience with truly creative photographers. At the Art Institute of Chicago around 1969, I began photographing the nude with Wendy, my wife, and I began making multiple image prints. Then for over thirty years I explored various techniques and processes while photographing the nude as a central theme. I began digital image making with the Apple IIe in 1984 where I explored juxtapositions, ie. portraits on top of nudes and pigment against raster scan lines. This led into the idea of scanning my finished images of palladium diptychs of a nude in water and using it as a module for a new Photoshop series of composited images. Repeating the diptych image many times with strange overlaps create a surreal statement. Next I scanned a series of B&W Nimslo camera multiple image shots of figures. These I colorized and reduced in size using Photoshop so that the image became a color pattern where it was hard to discern the tiny nude. In 1998 I began to work with pinhole photography. I use an oatmeal box pinhole camera to make 8x10 inch B&W negatives. With its extreme wide angle and distortion, the camera is a delight because it gives me results that are constantly a surprise. I develop the B&W negatives, scan them into Photoshop, and then colorize the image by pulling curves in each of the channels. It is a thrill to make an image rooted in 16th Century pinhole optics juxtaposed with 21st Century digital print manipulations. These newest photographs of mine are a blend of these opposites. In my diverse series, from multiple exposures, to juxtapositions of time, from plastic camera, Nimslo camera, scanner as camera to pinhole camera, I have always tried to find a mix of image and process with the nude as a theme. I currently head the Photography program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York where I teach photography classes and an Introduction to Digital Media class.

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