DANNY SINGER

BIO

Danny Singer is a photographer living and working in Vancouver. Born in Edmonton, Singer attended Simon Fraser University then began his career in the film department of the CBC. In 1970 he moved to Montréal, where he made the transition to still photography. Working out of the tradition of documentary photography and using contemporary photographic techniques, Singer’s primary project involves photographing small town Main Streets found in Canada’s prairie provinces and the American Midwest and presenting them as grand panoramas. Singer has exhibited in solo exhibitions across Canada and his work has been shown at ARCO in Madrid and the Cologne Art Fair. His work can be found in public collections across the country including: the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, the Canada Council Art Bank and Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

STATEMENT

“The towns and villages of the Canadian prairie exist in a continuum that is separate from the urban reference. They exist on the land, often without the warning barrier of sprawl to denote their coming. Their presence seems meagre, and their continued survival bears witness to their tenacity. They are governed by the vagrancies of weather and the economics of farming and defined by their main streets. For almost a decade, these small prairie towns have been the basis of my practice. I am intrigued with the physical structure of the street, its relationship to the land that it occupies, and by extension, the relationship of the people who use the street to the land and to each other. In Rockyford, the camera is placed at the end of Main Street looking through the town and out to the land. The telephoto lens compresses the perspective, drawing a distant field into town; what happens at a distance has the same import as that which is near. The static camera allows us to contemplate the rhythms of the street and we begin to sense the way that time passes. The camera has become the flâneur and the seemingly insignificant movement within the frame, the protagonist.”