Biography
With the exception of a few years in New York City, I have lived in New Mexico since I moved to Albuquerque in 1980 to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico. I was born and raised in Excelsior, Minnesota, a small lakeside community outside Minneapolis. I came to the southwest via California, where I received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Besides my undergraduate studies, I also worked as an assistant for the Friends of Photography, and the Ansel Adams Photography Workshops. At the workshops, I worked with many pivotal photographers, who were (are) responsible for blazing the trail of what defines photography today.
Since 1990, I have created commissioned photographic works for the editorial and advertising industry. My clientele includes national and international magazines and corporations. Over the years, I have developed a personal appreciation for each genre, and have been able to synthesize them both without sacrificing my personal integrity as an artist.
My photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and are in numerous permanent collections, such as, Los Angeles County Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Musee Nicephore Niepce in Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.
Statement
The initial influence for my narrative work was the existentialist writings of the Dirty Realists, primarily the work of Charles Bukowski, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, and John Fante, all of whom literally explored similar issues of self and the individual's perspective of an isolated and ambiguous world.
I direct and motivate my subjects in order to produce emotional expression and dramatic tension. The film - still quality of this work is intentional and adds a fictional quality to my personal investigation into the complicated relationships between human beings. In short, these manufactured realities are my own extrapolation of the many contradictions that make us human: our frailties, our strengths, our loneliness, our intimacies, and above all, our absurdities.
DANIEL PEEBLES