William B Keckler
Thank You !
Bill
Hi Bill -
Thanks for the gorgeous book. You are such a rebel - no copyright, no publishing company, no ISBN number. The photos are remarkable. Your lifelong devotion to the principles of art - as you outlined them to me in 1966 -has been inspirational; from the post cards to the window reflections and on. I also want to thank you for being pretty much the sole teacher to treat me like a worthy human being and not some fuck up who needed to improve. High school was not the best time for me - I bloomed later - but your love and support and modeling of adult behavior was a bright spot in a dim time. I well remember much from that cluttered and dingy classroom. The testament to the power of that bond is that it has lasted all through these years. We have lived through almost all our ages in each other's consciousness and what lives we have shared.
Please accept the enclosed collection of used newspaper articles and old liner notes as a humble gift in appreciation for all that you've given me and, in particular, your beautiful book, which is a true treasure to behold.
Respekt.
js
js = Smart Ass = lucky us
Shinto Manyoshu with Beckett's poems right here on my li'l table right here by my mother's leftover reclining chair = my hip-spine-head recovery nesting place which i should have left n should leave more often than not Bill, Bill.
Dear Bill, …
I am surprised that our paths have not crossed as we have a close parallel history and most of the people that you mention in your book are/were also my close friends. My introduction you your work was as a young museum director in Sydney, Australia, where I remember hosting John Szarkowski on a lecture tour to five major cities across the country. John gave a series of slide lectures on that tour where he presented images of your photo-postcards. He was fond of the San Diego sprinkler series that you had mailed to him. I thought that they were playful, inventive and smart and I loved how they expanded the idea of how to present one’s work outside of the traditional normal channels that were, and still are, notoriously difficult to break into. I was impressed not only by your work but also by your creative approach to getting it seen.
Your book is quite magnificent. What you did editing your words from Dan Skjaevaland’s interview into enigmatic impressions and vignettes is very clear to me. It becomes some sort of equivalent to your photographs. A memory narrative seems to me to be more like short phases and stand alone words rather than polished prose. I’m particularly thrilled to see a lot more of your work and I’m happy to know of your website.
So thank you for sending your book and reacquainting me with your work. The book has a prize of place in my library...
All the best,
Graham
Graham Howe Curatorial Founder & CEO
You Dam Busy John
Good
Happy Crocker People Pictures
Pleasures for you all !
i am being me - hip recovers slow
cramped spinal parts - knees - et al
You Know the spillover + bla bla
age wins some big ones
The book has run it's natural contemporary art capitalist coarse
i dont whine in public about nothin
We covered our 13k loan w sales!
Now I can return to free-shares
Twixt Dan Skjaeveland y meg 500 approx 79 books remain...
Now I donate them to photo-eye to sell when needed - they are good Picture-Folks!
Neighbors get em = block-famous
My-Our (Major Powers, et al) this here Website
is the second most thrilling ingredient in my li'l life.
I Love It.
that'll do it...
Os Bill
Sara i hear that people who cross as rude claim shyness
i am whatever you think
Luis is invited to billdane.com
on a desktop or lap to commune wit a real li'lbilly
the holes fuss-thing! please thru my "iLog"
(nevermind the buy page)
truthfully i only miss dead cats...
early onset dementia @ 1938…
BeWell
Emails between childhood Thacher School playdaters:
THANKYOU again Freida
will go as bigscreen as possible with your films!
Edie mother was alienated by lots
brother dead at 5
mother dead at 7
father William odd n distant
boys school
conservatives all over the places
she was a Vassar commie '30s
married against her reason
divorced to restart her journey
small $ worked frugal single mother
always socially progressive
open to & supportive of "outsiders"
created Head Start in west Pasadena
twice Woman of the Year in the Black community
"off-white" I call us
she had the backs of all cousins who finally came out
and to your recollection: she was warm & welcoming to all kids & "grownups" outside our family... common stuff
family=pushbuttons
= a fine childhood w ordinary traumas chills rejections ... joys
lots of free playing... onyourowness
. . . this is more than you need to pass by here
I fled southern California fa-sho
separated from cousins like from highschoolers
still bits connected to Anne Sherman Weezy Tony Families... Mike Hermes was a friend til dead
all lucky-good-bad-entitled stuff
I digress
Be Well
Bill
- - - - -
Freida Mock wrote:
Yes share (these emails) & I look forward to diving into your poetry/haiku/ word slam et al..and catching up. You’re next door to Berkeley where brother _ lives. I love visiting Ojai where daughter _ lives with her family…on Thacher Road!!! so I keep in touch with the clan that I think you kinda fled…you mom is very vivid, positive to me growing up, a beautiful person, lady…
Per films the recent ones are on the streamers but you can see some from our site but I hope you mirror to a big tv monitor for a fun effect -
Big cheers - Freida
FYI - American Film Foundation/ Sanders & Mock Prod -
https://www.google.com/search?q=american+film.foundatiom+vimeo+on+demand&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
- - - - -
Dear Found Freida, Lucky Again Bill.
Film goes to deep
Film has always been my THE !
By '61 Berkeley had 5-7 art film places Kael inspired gifts waiting for us
Treasures blind wandering of this non-academic gets some focus pointers
Robert Bresson Cassavetes Fellini Godard Fassbinder Almodovar Scorsese Lee Sayles Jarmusch lotsa boys ... got too busy to stay current
Todays Nancy and I do find all the girls on our wonders smallscreen
?How You All Manage! It All!? Films!
THANK YOU Freida+!
Your Links set us and Others up for Pleasures
You've gifted us all plenty (= no pkg we'll find all we've missed . . .)
Grateful Bill+
- - - -
Dear Bill,
It’s so generous and thoughtful of you to send me your magnificent book which I set aside for a moment until I could give it my full attention after my current deadlines.
When I realized there are so many fascinating ideas, poetry, ’stream of conscious’ flow of pictures and humanity in your book, I decided first to simply look at your photo and art and save text and words for a time when I could savor all.
As a first experience, I let your fascinating photos ‘wash over me’ and when I’m back from a short trip, first RT flight n 2 years !, I plan to read your book. It’s Great that Dan came in to your life, like a Boswell!
What I love about photography and your work is how ‘framing’ with your eye toward humanity creates a deep focus for the viewer. Congratulations on your body of work!
If you’re interested, I’m happy to send you some old media dvds of my work but much of it is available on the streaming sites or on Vimeo.
Attached here are trailers of my recent ’21 and ’22 releases, the later of which is in festivals, a few theaters and available on the streamers. I hope you see them!
Best,
Freda
freidamock. (LMK if there are dvds from here you’d like) ••••• “If have any interest in music being in a choir is fun...it’s like so fun.”- Billie Eilish, 6 years in choir starting at age 8
Friends - The Choir and Conductor, a sequel to the Oscar - nominated SING!, has launched in theaters and on streamers. Here’s the movie trailer https://www.laemmle.com/film/choir-and-conductor and here’s the Streaming info https://geni.us/TheChoirandConductor“This is the best children’s choir I've ever heard.” - Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen
What happens when a woman gets the chance to conduct? A world-renowned Choir for children where Billie Eilish learned to sing at age 8 is electrified by its charismatic Conductor Anne Tomlinson who uses the power of choral singing to profoundly shape and transform the lives of thousands of children. The story is a celebration of music and the arts as vital and healing to children’s well-being during times of uncertainty and cutbacks in the arts. ••••And here’s RUTH. Both movies are on the streaming platforms - ”RUTH - Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words,” a 90 Minute Feature Documentary Film - VIEW THE TRAILER Champion of Justice
- - - - -
Thanks Bill. I enjoy knowing you’re making the world a better place. Thanks! I remember the beautiful spirit of your mom and her smile. On occasion I see our ‘old gang’ - Weezy, Tony et al - as my daughter ____ lives in Ojai on Thacher Road and I love visiting the town which has been overrun and inflated by urbanites.
Wishing you very best -
Freida
freidamock.
- - - -
Hello Freida, Bill Dane
What is your mailing address please
Hoping you are good enough to Go...
Os
billdane.com
Bill WilliamThacherDane
Wicked white-supremacy
Savage capitalism
When BLACK LIVES MATTER all lives will
Planet survival = eco democratic socialism
Dan Skjæveland takes a 10 day written exam at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Porsgrunn
Becoming an official Folk School Professor (+++!)
OsXs from us over here
Bill
. . . Also I will enclose my book, Doodling on the Titanic: the Making of Art in a World on the Brink. I’m not sure whether it ever came to your attention. I’m hoping you will at least find the chapters about Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Art in The Age Of Melting Glaciers, and Art in the Age of Genetic Modification interesting. When I think about your work I think about it in terms of some of the ideas in those chapters.
There is so much about your work that invites interpretation. Rivers of words could be written about it. And some have, although the ones I’ve waded in, don’t seem to me to do you justice. Your work may invite interpretation, but is also allusive and slippery. It evades as much as it invites. Nice going, Bill. And I can’t resist adding my two cents (this is also partly why it’s taken a while to get back to you):
What I see in your work is this: I see reflections of reflections, representations of representations, in which “the real” has no primacy or rather is not privileged over the image. The fact is that our experience of “the real” is largely an experience of images, and therefore is fragmented and incoherent. To use the term that Walter Benjamin uses in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” – look at me, getting all fancy quoting Walter Benjamin – what is lost is the “aura” of the original, it’s privileging as against the reproduction. Benjamin was talking about the “original” work of art, but I think the same is true of the “aura” of immediate unmediated experience. If it’s not reproduced in some way it seems less real, and the images seem realer than whatever it is they are the images of. (Even in the early black and white (or rather tones of gray) photographs of, or example, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia or the pyramids of Egypt, you strip the famous tourist attractions of their “aura,” so they lose all pretense of being in any way more deserving of attention than any random thing one might choose to look at.
It seems you set yourself the task of paying attention to the random, the overlooked. all that we dismiss as not worthy of our attention. And what you reveal is mystery. For multiplying reproductions and reflections, weirdly degraded and distorted are in fact mysterious – what strange alchemy produced them? What path did they travel? What tales do they tell? And what you find as well as these multiplying reproductions is composition, pattern, colors that could be appreciated as “abstractions,” but your “abstract” compositions never allow us to forget the unsung, unheroic reality on which they are based and to which they remain tethered.
t seems to me this is what, intentionally, unintentionally, instinctively or with premeditation your work is “about,” although art is never “about” anything but itself.
Which brings me to what I think is an interesting paradox. In your photographs, original, unmediated experience has been replaced by its mediations, reproductions of reproductions. But you, the photographer are recording an unmediated experience of those layers of mediation. And each of your photographs is an “original – a “Bill Dane.” You could sign it on the back. And it is important that a Bill Dane photograph has an “aura, ” and the bigger the aura the better, because that’s how Bill Dane gets a reputation as an “important” photographer, gets exhibits in prestigious galleries, even at the holy of holies, the Temple Mount of art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that’s how Bill Dane gets Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and that’s how he makes – hopefully – money.
It looks like that was the path that you were on, and then – fame is fickle – the path seemed to peter out. As it says on page 322 of your book, “Bill’s work started disappearing from the gallery walls and institutions and photo public moved on to other work.” I wish it had not been so, and who knows, history may yet reward you, like so many who did not get the full measure of appreciation they deserved in their lifetime. But there is another way to look at it: Which is that ironically, the destruction of the aura of the real that your work memorializes now extends itself to the memorials you have created in your work. Without all that fancy scaffolding of fame and attention, your work loses its aura. Maybe people no longer pay it the attention it used to get. Maybe, just like what you photograph, your photographs are now neglected and overlooked. But nothing has changed. They are as valuable as they ever were. You began by mailing out thousands of free postcards. Now towards the end of a journey, you give away free copies of your book.
Okay. I’m done.
Osha Neumann email w permission 2022
Osha Bill
your words float overhead
It took me 4 years to find my mundanes
The fact is and always has been:
I walk and hunt for treasure unknown... with my history intuition
Instinct and soul engaged focused
Hoping to be grabbed by never-seen-by-me-before stuff
No theories... just a minds-on guy
But but I love and appreciate others' reactions!
These are the facts-fictions of life-viewings = you are right
Et ceteras
Os Bill
Dan Skjæveland
cousin Joe says your now famous fantastic guy is Knausgaard
so why did he move to Sweden
will you move
I'd like to move along a sidewalk
li’lbilly dont complain
i sat for 6 book+ years
xrays:
nothing weird
arthritic wear
no structural damage to hip replacements
spine = arthritic wear some compression & slips of discs nothing 83 unusual
I have spasms inflammations = exercise ice advil
now going to PT w diagnosis in working hands!
Go Slow
Sorry to Bother You
billdane.com
! Grateful Nancy and I
We paid back our $13k publishing loan with sales
I return to loved free-sharing:
Please see all my books here at FreeReadPress created by Joseph A. Dane
Os Bill
+: Books are still for sale at photo-eye and billdane.com
o dears…
OsXs
look at us
we are almost all still here
so much water under
you show up in dreams
and stuff real close
it even looks like Esther will nurse at camp and Romy will go
who is Esther Romy Monet Meg David Moses
who are we today
this is no way to tell
billdane.com
WilliamThacherDane
Wicked white-supremacy
Savage capitalism
When BLACK LIVES MATTER all lives will
Planet survival = eco democratic socialism
we went to the cousins’ 1938 wood rincon point beach house
it was full family beach weather and buttons
meNancy MonetNickRomy EstherJeremias MosesKatelyn
you can imagine
Welcome again to art!
If you are not here, what is the point?
Dan Skjæveland's photographs can be viewed and placed in our very short history of photography.
The first camera-photograph was taken in 1826.
Dan will likely include Eugene Atget, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand among his inspirers.
You, here and now, have all the context needed - your history - head, heart, and soul.
You have all the tools necessary for experiencing.
Some of Dan's pictures can feel like puzzles we are not equipped to solve.
No!
This is not a test!
We will all have our valid, personal reactions to the arts, and these pictures.
These are visual poems hunted and gathered in our places of public humanity.
Pictures created in a union of the common, the Skjæveland, and the camera-machine.
We are here as the expected collaborators in the experience.
I will take my time - I will chew with the patience of monks.
Bill Dane, 2019
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
European nations must DECIDE TACTICS against russia They Live and Die first
sorry Dan
you cant read nearest truth in flight ole brad f baby apparently misplaced my thing
n now WAR
i'm lucky living