Dan Budnik

1933 to 2020
Fine Art Photography

Dan Budnik is a photojournalist who has documented social and cultural change in the world for the past 55 years. He was at the heart of the civil rights movement, the center of the New York school of Abstract Expressionists and has been a fervent advocate for indigenous people.

Featured photographs below are from the New York School of Abstract Expressionist Artists in the 1950s and 1960s and important artists of the 20th century, The Civil Rights Movement, Selma to Montgomery, March 1965 and the “I Have a Dream” speech at the “March on Washington” in August 1963 

Dan Budnik Georgia O'Keeffe at the Ghost Ranch with Pots by Juan Hamilton. Very rare platinum print, 16 x 20 inch format, $12,000.00

Dan Budnik Georgia O'Keeffe, Potting Shed II, 16 x 20 format, image size, 16 x 10.75 inches, Silver gelatin Print $6,000.00

Georgia O'Keeffe holding Chama River stone, Abiquiu, New Mexico, March 1975, Dan Budnik, 1975 Cibachrome Print, 15.5 x 20 inches, $9,000.00

Dan Budnik Louise Nevelson, Grand Central Gallery,1958, With Cathedral I Cibachrome, 20 x 16 inches format paper, $9,000.00.

Arizona Photographers ,Snell & Wilmer Collection, Georgia O'Keeffe holding Chama River stone, Abiquiu, New Mexico, March 1975. "POSTER", signed, size 21 3/8 x 26 5/8 inches, image size 16 x 22 3/4, $225.00

Dan Budnik David Smith, Neo- Cubi I, Terminal Iron Works Bolton Landing, N.Y., March 1963 11 x 14 format, silver gelatin, Forte paper. Call for Pricing.

David Smith, South Field, Terminal Iron Works, Dan Budnik, Silver gelatin Print, Forte paper, 20 x 24 in. format, image 13 x 20 inches. Call for availability.

Dan Budnik David Smith cutting the circle for Primo piano III, Terminal Iron Works, Bolton Landing, New York 1962, Dye Transfer, 20 x 16 in. format, $8,000.00

Dan Budnik David Smith's North Field, Terminal Iron Works, Bolton Landing, New York, Winter 1962-63 Dye Transfer, 16 x 20 in format paper, $7,000.00

Dan Budnik Willem De Kooning, 831 broadway, New York,1962, Silver gelatin Print, vintage Forte paper. Call for pricing.

Martin Luther King, Jr deep in meditation after delivering his "I HAVE A DREAM" speech. August 28, 1963. Silver gelatin print. Price on request.

Isamu Noguchi and Long Island City Studio, Dan Budnik. Silver gelatin Print, 8 x 10 inches. $2,500.00

Helen Frankenthaler, New York, 1986, with "Summer Banner". Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, Price on request.

Jasper Johns with "Target with Plaster Casts", and "Target with Four Faces", at the Ernst Haas studio, East 71st Street, New York, 1958. Archival pigment print Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, Price on request.

Alexander Calder, sculpture field, Roxbury, Connecticut, 1965. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, $2,000.00

Alexander Calder, sculpture field, Roxbury, Connecticut studio, 1965. Call for pricing.

John Chamberlain, Cerro Gordo Compound, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1966. Call for pricing.

Lee Bontecou with "Untitled" wall relief, Wooster Street studio, New York, 1964. Call for pricing.

Robert Motherwell, New York, ca. 1966. Call for pricing.

Marisol Escobar, West 10th Street, New York, 1958, with "The Hungarians" Call for pricing.

Mark Rothko, 1458 First Avenue studio, New York, 1964. Call for pricing.

Louise Bourgeois, Louise Bourgeois with work from her "Personages" series, 347 West 20th Street, New York, 1965. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, $2,500.00 Framed

Robert Rauschenberg, Pearl Street studio, with "Charlene", left, and "Monogram", New York, 1958. Call for pricing.

Roy Lichtenstein with his sons David and Mitchell, West 26th Street studio, New York, 1964, with "We Rose Up Slowly" Call for pricing.

Selma to Montgomery March 1965 Day 4, At the Montgomery Municipal Airport, where a plane load of celebrities arrives. Mrs. King, having greeted Harry Belafonte with an enthousiastic kiss, playfully shares one with Dr. King. Call for pricing.

Selma to Montgomery March 1965 Day 4, Will Henry “Do-Right” Rogers with his hand-made flag and home-made pole, on the Rogert Gardner Farm Road, Lowndes County, 23 March 1965. Call for pricing.

Selma to Montgomery March 1965 Day 5, Triumphant civil rights leaders entering Montgomery on Oak Street. From left to right: Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King with Frederick Reese. Price on request.

Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Paul Stookey singing inside the Lincoln Memorial. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

Paul Newman, Sammy Davis Jr, Marlon Brando and Joseph Mankiewicz. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

Charlton Heston reading a civil rights declaration on behalf of the Hollywood delegation. Left to right: James Baldwin, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Washington National Airport, DC. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

Marlon Brando, James Baldwin and Joseph Mankiewicz marching to the rally. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

An enthusiastic "brotherhood" hand clasp after the "I HAVE A DREAM" speech - Mahalia Jackson, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake and Walter P Reuther, UAW. Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963. Price on request.

MLK, Jr being congratulated after his speech. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

Waiting for buses to return home - 140,000 people came via trains and buses. August 28, 1963. Price on request.

Martin Luther King, Jr deep in meditation after delivering his “I HAVE A DREAM” speech. August 28. 1963. As featured on the 4 global covers of the August 26, 2013 issue of Time Magazine.

In August 2014 Marching to the Freedom Dream was published by Trolley Books in London. The book shows Dan Budnik’s significant body of work documenting three seminal marches of the Civil Rights movement, between 1958 and 1965. The publication coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and precedes the 50th anniversaries of the Selma-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act in 2015. With the introduction written by the prolific civil rights activist, Harry Belafonte, an essay by the American photo historian James Enyeart and an afterword by Dan Budnik. Autographed, Price: $250.00

As a photojournalist, Dan Budnik is known for his photographs of artists, but also for his photo-documentation of the Civil Rights Movement and of Native Americans. Born in 1933 in Long Island, New York, Budnik studied with Charles Alston at the Art Students League of New York (1951-53) and began his photography career as Philippe Halsman’s assistant. Working at Magnum Photos (1957-64) in 1963, Budnik persuaded Life Magazine to have him create a long-term photo essay showing the seriousness of the Civil Rights Movement, documenting the Selma to Montgomery march and other historical Civil Rights moments. Budnik went on to photograph for premier publications such as Life, Fortune, Look, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Vogue.

He has been a major contributor to eight Time-Life Wilderness and Great Cities series and received a 1973 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work on the Hudson River Ecology Project and a 1980 grant from the Polaroid Foundation for Big Mountain: Hopi-Navajo Forced Relocation.

Biography

Pastaza, Ecuador, December 2004 Photo by Kresta King Cuther

Dan Budnik, (b. 1933-died 2020), whose career as a photographer has spanned more than half a  century, was most recent recipient, in 1998, of the prestigious American Society of Media Photographers Honor Roll Award, an accolade previously accorded to such eminent photographers as Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, André Kertész, Ernst Hass, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. After studying with Charles Alston at the Art Students League of New York (1951-53), Budnik began his career as a Magnum photographer.

His photo-essays have appeared in periodicals that include Art in America, LIFE Magazine, Fortune, The London Sunday Times, Magazine, Look, Modern Photography, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Réalités and Vogue. He has been a major contributor to many books, including six from the Time-Life Wilderness and Great Cities series. Budnik’s photographs appear in “The Museum: An Informal Introduction to The Museum of Modern Art” by Richard Schickel (1970).  He is included in two seminal histories of photography: Nathan Lyons’ “Photography in the Twentieth Century” (1967) and “The Picture History of Photography from the Earliest Beginnings to the Present Day”, by Peter Pollack (1977).

Dan Budnik lives in Tucson, Arizona and is currently involved with creating a photographic record of ancient petroglyphs. Widely acclaimed for his photo-documentation of Native Americans (including his collaboration with Sandy Johnson on  “The Book of Elders: The Life Stories of Great American Indians”, 1994), the Civil Rights Movement, and environmental issues.  Budnik received a 1973 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work on the Hudson River Ecology project and a 1980 grant from the Polaroid Foundation for Big Mountain: Hopi-Navajo Forced Relocation.

The scope of Dan Budnik’s documentation of major 20th century artists has yet to be fully recognized. In addition to David Smith, he photographed Georgia O’Keeffe,  Lee Bontecou, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and many others.

Dan Budnik’s photographs of David Smith first appeared as an April 5, 1963 photo essay for LIFE Magazine. They were first exhibited, in 1974, at the University Art Museum State University of New York, Albany, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, and Rice University, Houston, Texas. The same exhibition circulated nationally under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts, from 1975-78. They have been widely published, and have become an essential part of the extensive body of literature on Smith. Twenty-four of Budnik’s photographs of Smith are reproduced in the catalogue of the current exhibition at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, David Smith: A Centennial.

Selected Public Collections

“Picturing Artists (1950s-1960s)” Photographs by Dan Budnik

The young Jasper Johns stands atop a small ladder to smooth one of the gridlines on his silver “Numbers” painting of 1964. He is wearing an oddly coordinated padded silver jumpsuit, mindless of the camera that captures him mid-gesture. Photographed the same year, Roy Lichtenstein strides thoughtfully across his studio floor while his two young sons read from dozens of comic books spread out all over the rug. In 1967,  Diane Arbus leans against a tabletop at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, nonchalant in a chic white mini-dress and matching thigh-high boots, while her camera hangs heavily around her neck. This deluxe collection of intimate, highly compelling color and black-and-white photographs includes portraits of many of the most important and pioneering artists of the postwar period in American art. The series, which includes studies of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, David Smith and many others, was, in fact, initially inspired by the work of Cartier-Bresson, from whom Budnik learned to adopt an attitude of anonymity with respect to his subjects, working–as noted photo historian James Enyeart writes in his catalogue essay–“at the periphery of their attentiveness to his camera.”

Features outstanding essays by James Enyeart and Irving Sandler, America’s premier chronicler of postwar American art, as well as a reprint of a little-known essay by the influential British art critic and curator David Sylvester, which was originally published alongside Budnik’s photographs in 1964.  James Enyeart has had a long and distinguished career as a proponent and historian of photography.  He currently holds an endowed professorship at the Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Sante Fe, of which he was the Founding Director. Previously, he has been Director of The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Moving Images, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Friends of Photography in Carmel, California.  Knoedler & Company 2006-2007