Photographer's Profile

Dan McCormack

Dan McCormack Fine Art Nude Photography, United States

I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Photography in 1965 at the Institute of Design in Chicago where I studied with Aaron Siskind and Wyn Bullock. I went on for an MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While as a student there I Photographed my first nudes and that became my theme for my MFA Thesis. Then I began to make multiple images of a nude in a grid The thesis was an exploration of Set Theory math. In grids of 5x5, 8x8 or 10 by 10, I found numeric rules to order the photographs, not design or composition rules. I earned my MFA in Photography degree in 1969. Then for over fifty years I have continued exploring the theme of the nude with different techniques, processes and cameras. Around 1999 I began to explore the Pinhole Camera and for almost twenty years. I shot 8x10 film in a home made Pinhole camera using a Quaker Oats container. My project was the “NUDE at HOME” and my exposures were two minutes, using a 650 watt studio lamp. This was a very slow way of shooting as I took a lot of time in an attempt to see the image before I made the exposure. Because of the long exposures many images were lost because the model moved during the exposure. Around 2018 I began to explore the cell phone camera. The cell phone camera made making an image very spontaneous. I could make about fifty images in the time it would take to make one pinhole camera image. Because I had many closely related images in time, I came to explore grids again. I could select nine images that were closely related and create sequences that spoke to time or a story.