1933-2020
Dan Budnik (b.1933, d.2020) studied painting at the Art Students’ League of New York. After being drafted, he started photographing the New York school of Abstracts Expressionist and Pop Artists in the mid-fifties, making it a primary focus for several decades. He made major photo-essays on Willem de Kooning and David Smith, among many other artists. It was his teacher Charles Alston at the Art Students’ League of New York, the first African American to teach at the League, who inspired his interest in documentary photography and the budding Civil Rights Movement.
In 1957 he started working at Magnum Photos, New York, assisting several photographers, notably Cornell Capa, Burt Glinn, Eve Arnold, Ernst Haas, Eric Hartmann, and Elliott Erwitt. In March 1958, Budnik traveled to live with the underground in Havana for 6 weeks during the Cuban revolution. Budnik continued to work with Magnum for half of his time, until joining as an associate member in 1963. In 1964, he left Magnum and continued specializing in essays for leading national and international magazines, focusing on civil and human rights, ecological issues, and artists.
Since 1970, Budnik worked with the Hopi and Navajo traditional people of northern Arizona and received for this work a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1973 and a Polaroid Foundation Grant in 1980. In 1998 he was the recipient of the Honor Roll Award of the American Society of Media Photographers.
Selected Museum Collections
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
- Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY
- Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
- Fine Arts Museum of Houston, Houston, TX
- Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
- Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany
Selected Grants
- Polaroid Foundation: Big Mountain: Hopi Navajo Forced Relocation, 1980
National Endowment for the Arts | Hudson River Ecology Project, 1973
Selected Awards
- American Society of Media Photographers INC | Honor Award, 1998
In the company of, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Ernst Haas
Selected Publications
- Marching to the Freedom Dream, 2014 Trolley Books
- Picturing Artists (1950’s-1960’s), 2007 Knoedler & Company
- The Book of Elders, 1994 Harper-Collins
- Georgia O’Keeffe- Another Look, 1992 Addison Wesley
- Rome, 1976 Time Life Great Cities Series
- The Sierra Madre, 1975 Time Life Wilderness Series
- The Museum, A Guide to the Museum of Modern Art in NY, 1970