PRÉCIS + PAST / PRESENT + PROCESS:
PRÉCIS: OCCASIONAL LIGHT
Light continuously shifts and suffuses. Never quite known, light occasions fresh perspectives for the attentive eye. My own visual production also shifts accordingly. As I embrace forms and environments that I might have rejected before, invigorating new work emerges.
Photography for me inhabits a space somewhere between poetry and motion picture film, my two areas of advanced practice. As many of my recent photos were taken in New York, I sometimes reflect upon the wisdom of gifted New York photographer, Saul Leiter. If I were pressed to choose but one influence on my still photography, Leiter's alluring layers and textures of the city -- "a window covered with raindrops interests me more than a famous person" -- would be a good candidate.
Leiter suggests, "there are things that are out in the open, and there are things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has to do, with the things that are hidden. You think?" I offer my recent work here in a spirit of discovery, a search for "the things that are hidden."
PAST / PRESENT:
My visual exploration tests the notion of "limit experience" -- across boundaries, across time, across space -- as a mode of creating rigorous and enriching fine art works. Layered media and temporal shifts imprint their playful traces within my photography.
Much of my reflection, such as work in poetry and translation, has been concerned with other artists, writers, and artistic disciplines. Earlier, I worked on aesthetics with late philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. These touchstones now percolate through my current artistic practice, as does a delight in the process of naming.
As I learn to transform disparate experience and honor it within my process, I am reciprocally sustained and fulfilled as an artist.
PROCESS: SIGNATURE EDITION PRINTS
A fine art photographic print exhibits unique, light-giving properties. It is not merely a facsimile of an image from a computer display. It can be held, contemplated. A fine art print enlivens its surroundings.
Only a few of the photos I create reach the final printmaking stage. For each edition, an intensive development period culminates in an archival work. Great attention is paid to shooting, selection, subtleties of materials and printing capacities.
The print assembly, created in partnership with a Master Printmaker, helps determine these choices. It may be helpful to imagine my signature prints as something of a cross between a painting and a photograph. It is the process itself -- image, material, assembly -- that creates a unified statement. This integrity allows the work to issue forth its greatest light for you.
--Daniel M. Freed, 2014-24
susanne kessler
Daniel Freed
Paul Ayars
Daniel Freed
Daniel Freed (the other one)
Ralph Rahmer
Daniel Freed
And a belated thank you to Daniel Freed, the other one :) Fantastic to meet you ~