This week’s meeting of Bangor & North Down Camera Club had as a speaker the New York state based photographer Dan Burkholder, in an event which was jointly run on Zoom by the club, and the Royal Photographic Society (RPS). Dan is a very well-known photographer and photographic educator, who has published several photography books, and who runs photographic workshops all around the world. Dan is also well known to the club, having visited and run a workshop in the club premises back in 2004. The RPS attendees were from across the UK and Ireland, and also included some international visitors from among other places the Netherlands and India.
Dan is well known for his work as a pioneer in several areas of photographic work. These include mobile photography, which Dan has been championing for about 15 years, and also the use of digital images as the basis for photographs created using old traditional methods such as platinum / palladium printing. This approach involves using a digital image to produce a negative, this is then printed using traditional methods which involve the paper being coated in platinum/palladium chemicals, exposed using UV light and then washed and made permanent in a similar way to the silver prints normally produced in the darkroom. Dan is also responsible for the introduction of two original darkroom techniques, creating the pigment over platinum print in 2001 and the platinum over gold leaf print in 2007.
Dan showed many of his photographs and for each discussed the approach and methods used in the creation of the image. He also talked through some of his photographic projects, these are bodies of work with a particular focus area. Dan’s projects included sets of images taken in Cuba, Romania and Ukraine.
Taxi Driver, Cuba ©Dan Burkholder
Dan also showed some images from a fascinating series which he took in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina. These images, taken during three different trips, were mostly the interiors of buildings which had been left devastated by the floods which followed the hurricane.
School auditorium after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans ©Dan Burkholder
Dan then gave a short workshop on iPhone photography, where he discussed and demonstrated some of his favourite phone apps for the manipulation and processing of images.
Dan finished his talk by showing a few old personal photographs make the point that whilst he is passionate about his photography and his photographic projects, he also feels his most important photographs are those he has taken of family and friends.
If you would like to see more of Dan’s work, you can visit his website at www.danburkholder.com.
Next week we have the second round of this year’s Northern Ireland Photographic Association (NIPA) interclub competition with the theme of Abstract Photography. This will be hosted by NIPA, and will feature the photographs entered by all the NIPA clubs from across the province.