ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I photograph the familiar backdrop of life. For me, it’s an experiment – using my camera to find new ways to see the world. I direct the camera to my chosen subject matter, my goal being to discover ways to show these things that are normally hidden from us.

I use older Polaroid-type instant cameras and my iPhone camera. I don’t crop, filter, or "Photoshop" my photos to manipulate their composition (although it may look that way). I’m exploring the interplay between artist control and leaving the door open for Chance and evaluating the results.

Viewing these photographs can bring new meanings to what we see every day.

-Dan Borden, May 2022

SOME QUESTIONS & ANSWERS [This section will be posted by mid June]

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

CRITIQUES

"Dan Borden is a seeker, an artist constantly looking for ways to transform everyday sights into something new. Sometimes the result is purely abstract; often, the ingredients of the image remain recognizable. Using a variety of vintage instant film cameras and, more recently, iPhones, he creates powerful images while challenging both the notion of the traditional function of a camera and the traditional definition of a photographic image.

What all of Borden’s photographs have in common is that they play with what viewers recognize and what they do not. Caught up in the shapes, lines, textures and colors of Borden’s work, we viewers try to make associations and search for what is familiar. Getting lost inside the imagery along the way is an essential part of it. Viewing Borden’s work is not a linear process of receiving an unfolding narrative; rather it is an associative journey of puzzling out what we know, what we do not know, and what it is okay to never truly know. In the end, we become seekers as well, as we learn new ways of seeing while ultimately finding ourselves, to our surprise, right back where we began.”

–Francine Weiss, PhD
Senior Curator, Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

"Many photographers produce glossy, pretty photographs of architecture and urban settings and these images serve their purpose as advertisements for owners wishing to rent space or sell their buildings. But these photographs, no matter how well composed, dramatically lit, and beautifully printed on fine paper, are nothing more than static images.

In contrast, Dan Borden creates original, even unique, still and video images of (urban) architecture that elevate street photography to new heights. His images are filled with the passion, movement, and excitement of fine art/architecture and fine photography. His artistic vision guides the viewer to see the mundane in new ways. The buildings move, disintegrate, reform and create a new world never previously seen by the viewer.

Through his photography, Borden is exploring his environment. Or more accurately he is creating a new, surreal environment. And like many prominent recent artists, such as Andy Warhol, he is taking the commonplace and showing the viewer the depth and intrinsic beauty of objects, structures, and scenes we so often take for granted."

–William Lebovich, Architectural Historian, Photographer & Author of Design For Dignity

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

"In its process, Dan Borden’s photographic work, particularly that of the past three years, represents an intriguing blend of chaos and control. In its visual results, it presents a parallel blend — no less intriguing — of representation and abstraction. The presence of some familiar object, scene, or texture amidst the rich exuberance of his images draws us in, and makes us feel as if we are beginning to get our bearings. But even a complete parsing of the image (which often is not possible in any case, thanks to the serendipitously anomalous ways that instant photographic film responds to Borden’s technique of multiple exposures) does not ‘resolve the mystery’ for us in the way we might have expected.

For what Borden’s images do is to create a strange parallel universe, one in which the familiar (and even the prosaic and sterile) behave in strange ways. Things seem to be vibrating or flickering in front of us, or to have been caught in a composite, Muybridge-like record of motions that our mind tells us could not possibly have occurred, even as our eye happily accepts that they did.

There is also a dimensional, even multi-dimensional feeling to many of Borden’s images. There is an amazingly powerful sense of planes and complex surfaces passing through each other, and in doing so they reveal a power to perceive dimensionality that is vast, and effortlessly leaps beyond any use for dimensionality that a physical object might be able to manage.

Again, our eyes gladly accept in Borden’s imagery what our minds reject as being impossible.”

–Josiah Fisk, President, More Carrot

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ 

My work was featured in the Feb 2013 issue of Loupe: The Journal of The Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.
Download a High Res PDF