Danny Singer's Street Stories

GAINSBOROUGH WINTER SKY
Digital pigment print mounted on Alupanel with UV laminate
40 7/8 x 71 1/18 inches
dannysinger.net

THE ARTIST: Danny Singer

BEST KNOWN FOR: Enormous, eloquent skies looking over quiet rural towns in photographs comprised of as many as 140 seamlessly sequential images.

THE ALLURE OF THE PRAIRIE: "My connection to the West is to the prairie. There's something that keeps drawing me back. Things seem to be visually simplified on the prairie, to my eye. It bores a lot of people, but it excites me."

ON PROCESS AND PREPARATION: "It takes about three hours to shoot the images. My wife and I make a line with a piece of chalk for about three blocks. The camera is on a big heavy tripod, and every frame is treated like a large-format photograph because it may have information in it that I need. Then it takes about three weeks on Photoshop to get from one end of town to the other. Everything has to match up. I have to make choices using 130 to 140 frames to get it seamless and precise."

OF TOWNS AND TIME: "There's something very special about these small prairie towns. Things move at a pace so different from what we're used to in the city. What appeals to me about what I do is that it slows down a moment in time. The long, narrow streetscapes invite you to peer into the windows and look into the barber shop. They're all visual tricks: Playing with perspective and depth of field is just using more of what photography has to offer to manipulate the image. My choice is to make images with this hyper-clarity so you can get in there. The story of the town is told in the clarity of the things you can see."

WHAT'S NEXT: Through May 22, 2016: "Standing Still: Photographs by Danny Singer" at the Denver Art Museum.