Jonathan Green
American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to Present
NY, 1984
Bill Dane is the archetypal tourist. His work consists of self-made postcards sent back from his travels. Dane's cards are not "mail art" or "concept art." They are the real things: true souvenirs of the road and visual experience. Like the best commercial travel postcards, Dane's photographs record specific visual character without embellishment. His subjects are almost always public attractions: zoos, parks, city streets, fairs, monuments, hotels, fountains, and highways—places properly civilized and certified for tourist consumption. In this civilized world the landscape becomes merely one more element in a host of visual elements. Telephone poles and palm trees are described with the same understated equanimity, both being merely visual facts.
American photography has always focused on the commonplace, the inelegant day-to-day world. Yet Evans, Callahan, Frank, Winogrand, and Friedlander represented the ordinary with a subtle invocation of myth, spirituality, politics, or beauty. Dane refuses to divulge anything but the visual shape of experience. His style is free from metaphors and metaphysics; he gives us back the surface of the world with consummate understatement. More than any other contemporary photographer, Dane has demonstrated Lewis Baltz's dictum: "The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art."