Artist Portfolio Magazine’s 10 Art Competition

Dan McCormack – Accord, NY

The Nude at Home

In this series, I use traditional 8 x 10 black-and-white film in a homemade oatmeal-box pinhole camera to create wide-angle distortions with the cylindrical focal plane. There is a sense of discovery and joy in this process, as the resulting images are unpredictable and surprising. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary. By then replacing the black-and-white values with subtle hues through successive pulling of curves in Photoshop, I interact with and interpret the image. The “Nude at Home” is a subset of a larger pinhole-camera project begun in 1998. In this series, I photograph the model nude in her own home, apartment, or studio, surrounded by her possessions for two-minute exposures. A collaboration between model and photographer, the images attempt to reveal an intimate portrait of the subject.

BIO

I began studying Photography around 1962 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 School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967, I began photographing the nude with Wendy, my wife, and I began making multiple image prints. Then for over forty years I explored various techniques and processes while photographing the nude as a central theme.

In 1998 I began to work with pinhole photography. I use an oatmeal box pinhole camera to make 8×10 inch B&W negatives. With its extreme wide angle and distortion, the camera 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. I make an images rooted in 16th Century pinhole optics juxtaposed with 21st Century digital print manipulations. These newest photographs of mine are a hybrid of Photography and Digital Printmaking.

In 2009, I won the Ultimate Eye Foundation’s grant for Figurative Photography and had my work featured in an exhibition at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont, CA.

I currently head the Photography program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York where I teach the photography classes.