Bill Dane is a Berkeley-based photographer. His photos can be seen at www.billdane.com.
To quote from the San Francisco Chronicle,
Bill Dane's photographs, like those at the Jack Fischer Gallery, often make people think that he exploits the latest image-altering technology.
But Dane shoots "straight" as a point of pride, though he breaks as many rules of "good photography" as possible in the process.
The pictures slam together information from two or more incompatible viewpoints. Most look through shop windows into the images and other trappings they contain and into the reflections or shadows the photographer and his surroundings cast.
"San Francisco, 2005," like most of the pictures titled only by place and date, has us look over a swimming pool at a bleak suburban landscape just after sunset. It also has us observing an out-of-focus urban hillside in full daylight. Dane's hatted silhouette, camera in hand, serves as connective tissue between these views.
Dane has an amazing eye for collisions of information that throw into relief the artifice of photography and the folly of our desire to trust it.
In "San Francisco, 2004" he captured from behind a sleeping man slouched within a plate-glass bus shelter. Flattened by shadow and reflections, the man's figure looks like a more-than-half-sapped inflatable.
