Dante A. Penman's Page

Latest Activity

Dante A. Penman is now a member of Artist Books 3.0

Mar 30, 2012

Welcome Them!

Profile Information

Your website address:: http://cargocollective.com/dantepenman

Name of institution/organisation/press/studio?: School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa

Background: The work of Dante is concerned with his own disconnected obsession with the period of time between the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960’s encompassing everything from Cubism, Art Deco and Film Noir through to Mid-Century Modernism. While aesthetically he looks to celebrate all of these elements, he also looks for the psychological path that journeys through fear and pessimism, idealist dreams, objectivism and isolation of the individual.

Drawing narrative influences from film, art and literature, he has unearthed themes from the works of such visionaries as David Lynch, Francis Bacon and J G Ballard that coincide with each other and help to punctuate his photographic work. Dante also enjoys the visual work of Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman, Edward Steichen and Gregory Crewdson and 20th century fashion and portraiture artists such as Horst, Yousuf Karsh and Irving Penn.

Dante has been studying the photographic arts since 2004, alongside Tactile/Fine Arts, Music and traditional Graphic Design techniques. His first exhibition was a selection of prints from a disposable 35mm camera that documented his life and identity as a homeless teenager in coastal Wales. He has discovered a deep connection between the different artistic media he has studied, which offer him a seemingly endless outlet for his creative visions. In 2009, he was included as a contributing pinhole artist in the book, The Pinhole Camera: A practical how-to, and subsequently ran several small pinhole photography workshops for supported housing projects in the South Wales area.

He is currently studying at the School of Photographic Arts in Ottawa and working on multi-media projects that use text and field recordings to emphasize narrative in his visual work.