Dan McCormack

Biography

Dan McCormack studied Photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago Next, he earned an MFA in 1969 in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He began photographing the nude with Wendy, his wife while in graduate school. Then for over fifty years he explored various techniques and processes while photographing the nude as a central theme.
.In 1982, Dan McCormack won a NYSCA-CAPS Photography Fellowship with a series of infrared nude images made of Wendy. With that series, he produced a monograph, "BODY LIGHT-Passages in a Relationship" in 1989.
In 1998 Dan began to work with pinhole camera photography. In 2009, he won the Ultimate Eye Foundation’s grant for Figurative Photography and had his work featured in an exhibition at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont, CA.

In January 2010, Dan McCormack had a solo show at the Photography Center of the Capitol District in Troy, NY. He showed over fifty images from ten diverse series made from 1990 to 2010. In May 2013, Dan had a solo show at the Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie, NY. In this exhibit he showed 28 images from his “Nude at Home” series. Then in January 2016 he had a solo show of the “Nude at Home” series at the Beacon Artists Union in Beacon, NY and in May of 2016, Dan had another show with newer images of the “Nude at Home” series at the Arts Upstairs Gallery in Phoenicia, NY.

Dan was one of the three founders of the Center for Photography in Woodstock in 1975
and in 1989 he was a founding member of Level 3 Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Dan McCormack came to Marist College in 1991 to teach film photography in the Art and Digital Media Dept. and he currently heads the film photography program.

Artist Statement

GRID IMAGES of NUDES

I began to make multiple images in a grid in 1967 while working on my MFA Thesis in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Here I created different sized grids. 5 X 5, 8 x 8 and 10 x 10. I was interested in finding mathematical set theory patterns to fill the grid.
I returned to grids in 1992 when I combined 24 images with the Nimslo Camera. The Nimslo created four stereoscopic half frame 35 mm negatives when the shutter was released. I contact printed two moments in time on a row then four more moments in time two more rows, thus 24 frames. My interest was in creating an image in time.
Later in 1999 I began exploring grids again with the Action Tracker camera. The camera records two images in a moment from a slightly different angle. So I combined two moments in time ( four images ) in a row and then three more rows of related action. The final image would have 16 images of action.
In this project I am working with a cell phone camera to create 3 x 3 GRID images of a model, nude in the studio. Because of the spontaneity of working with the cell phone camera, I react quickly to the pose of the model. I can make closely related but different images in a matter of moments. I have found that with the model the creation of the images is a collaboration. Again, I am interested in how TIME is a part of the image.

Country USA

Website https://waamart.org/artist_page/dan-mccormack-figurative-photography/