Setting the Stage (Photos)

Dan Kane is an American-born photographer who moved to Berlin in 1983. He stayed loyal to analog film rather than moving to digital, so his work has a rare quality of something disappearing before our eyes. The film companies have stopped producing more and more of these types of film, thus his work becomes an archive of the past in more ways than one.

Dan explains how he became a photographer in this statement from his site: ”In the famous story of the great 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, it is said she was given her first camera by her daughter as a way to occupy her time while her husband was away. In my case, as with so many others, the beginning of the story was equally fortuitous: Knowing I was about to spend a year abroad as an exchange student, my mother gave me my first camera, saying I would probably want to take pictures while I was away. Neither of us realized how important that little Instamatic camera would turn out to be, and now, 47 years and over a hundred thousand images later, I present the different portfolios shown here as a reflection of the work I have made since back then in 1970.”

In his “Kulisse” series, he explores the haunting and emotional settings of abandoned buildings, contrasting them with the heathy, vital flesh and form of his male models.

“'Kulisse’ is a German word for background, theater set, context. The photos [here] were taken at a number of old ruined/abandoned sites around Berlin, mainly at Beelitz-Heilstätten, about an hour outside Berlin where up to 2,000 TB patients at a time were treated before WWI and between the wars. During the wars and after, it was a military hospital, a huge complex of buildings, now gradually being turned into condos (alas). The Soviets had it after the war until they withdrew in '94.”

You can see a wonderful amount of work on his website, as well as purchase his previous books. Check out his work on Artnet.com. For information on a recently published book on his work, see this link 6–9: Notes from the archive of Dan Kane, and for more details about this and other events, see his Facebook page.