© All Photos Copyright 2023
Daniel M. Kummer
All rights reserved
About Daniel Kummer
Bio
I am a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York and North Egremont, Massachusetts. I am also a retired media lawyer, woodworker, blues harmonica player and volunteer local civic leader in Brooklyn. I have been taking photographs of interesting people, places and things since 1964, and have studied photography at the New School and Brooklyn Museum.
My body of work spans a wide range of genres, including abstract images extracted from natural settings, wilderness landscapes, street photography, portraits and flowers. My influences include Robert Frank, Vivien Maier, Helen Levitt, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Hannah Dilian. A number of my photos are in private collections.
To the extent there is any unifying principle or primary approach in my work, it is narrative: with every photo, including abstracts and landscapes, I strive to tell a story. My goal is to evoke in the viewer a feeling that - alongside me - they have witnessed or experienced something unique and instructive, whether lasting or ephemeral. Occasionally, if I'm fortunate, the feeling produced might even be transcendant.
Current Project: Johnson & Boswell in Scotland
In August-September 2023, I launched my current ongoing project commemorating the 250th anniversary of the famous journey through the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides Islands taken in 1773 by Dr. Samuel Johnson and his friend and later biographer James Boswell, each of whom published journals that reside in the canon of travel literature. Having read Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in college, I returned to it in 2023 as I prepared for a trip to Scotland. I was particularly struck by Johnson's lament -- in the midst of describing his entourage’s exploration of a remote coastal cave-- concerning the inability of 18th Century travelers to capture and record an immediate, accurate and detailed description - much less an image - of the physical wonders they encountered:
"An observer deeply impressed by any remarkable spectacle, does not suppose, that the traces will soon vanish from his mind, and having commonly no great convenience for writing, defers the description to a time of more leisure, and better accommodation. He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea. To this dilatory notation must be imputed the false relations of travellers, where there is no imaginable motive to deceive. They trusted to memory, what cannot be trusted safely but to the eye, and told by guess what a few hours before they had known with certainty."
Johnson’s true lament was for a miraculous device that he could not -- even with his preternatural linguistic powers and his innate scientific understanding -- imagine or describe. In 1773, it would still be more than fifty years before the first known permanent photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce of the barely discernible view from his upstairs window at Le Gras in France.
For three weeks in August-September 2023, driving a tiny red Fiat 500 on often single-track roads, I roughly followed the path of Johnson and Boswell's 1773 tour, with the goal of taking the photographs they were not able to take. Some of those photos are displayed in the "Scotland 2023" gallery on this website. A photo essay book, tentatively entitled “What Cannot Be Trusted Safely But to the Eye,” is in progress and targeted for publication in 2024.
Prints
Framed and unframed prints of a selected group of photos from this website are available on my page in the Format Prints Marketplace, using the "Prints" link on the site menu. The link brings you to the Professional Prints page for ordering basic unframed prints. Use the "Products" menu if you would like to order Framed Prints, or unframed Giclee Prints, Metal Prints or Canvas Prints (not every option is available for every photo). More photos will be added to the Prints Marketplace in the future. If you are interested in aquiring a print of a photo I have not yet listed for sale, please contact me at the email address below to request that it be uploaded to the Marketplace.
