Dan Kane: Between Timeless and Time-bound     (by Don H. Mader | EUROS #31 | 1996)

The work of Dan Kane is a fascinating interplay of the timeless and the time-bound.

Normally we think of photography as a process that stops time. It slices 1/100th of a second out of time, out of whatever happens to be in front of the camera, and freezes it on film, preserving it as though in an time capsule for later viewers. That is the fascination of old anonymous snapshots, to see what people and places looked like, "how things were then" and the power of the keepsake photo that allows us to remember just how a lover looked, before time and age had their way.

But there are other things that photography can do with time as well. It can persuade us that it is showing us the timeless, probing behind the chance circumstances of time to the very unchanging essence of things. That is a function to which the nude lends itself particularly well, proclaiming the intention of stripping away the superficial, changing fashions of clothing to reveal to us the essence of "man" or "woman". Setting the subject against a plain black or white background, without props, eliminating the clues to time given by interior decoration, can be another visual signifier of this universalizing intention. Of course, there is a sense in which basic body shapes are a give-away of time - there is no way one would mistake the body of a typical turn-of-the-last-century man or woman for one from the 1950's, or in turn for one of the 1990's, but a photographer can minimize this by choosing perhaps atypical, timeless subjects who embody what is thought to be universal. ...