Winner of the 2012 Los Angeles Book Festival Photography/Art Book Award, Dan Winters’ America: Icons and Ingenuity is the first retrospective of the career of this talented artist. Winters has spent more than two decades creating memorable photographs for such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Best known for his iconic celebrity portraits, Winters has photographed public figures ranging from the Dalai Lama to President Barack Obama, Hollywood celebrities from Leonardo DiCaprio to Helen Mirren, and artistic luminaries from Jeff Koons to William Christenberry. His style of portraiture is instantly recognizable, characterized by impeccable lighting, muted backgrounds, and the contemplative postures of his sitters.
Winters’ lifelong fascination with science, technology, and human ingenuity finds similar expression in significant groups of photographs: close-up studies of honeybees and airplanes and a magnificent series devoted to the last three launches of NASA’s space shuttles. These photographs reveal an aspect of Winters’ career that is less familiar than his commercial work but equally compelling.
In addition to the popular icons, America includes expressions of Winters’ personal vision. This lyrical body of work shows the same keen eye for lighting and composition, but with a decidedly more intimate ambiance: photographs of his wife and son, spare cityscapes, and elegant collages.
America: Icons and Ingenuity also includes a biographical essay that traces his development in a varied and productive career that is, itself, a work in progress.