New Finding Aid | Dan Powell Photographs

Special Collections and University Archives is pleased to announce a newly updated finding aid for the Dan Powell photograph collection (PH297) now published on Archives West. This collection consists of constructed imagery and large format photographic prints taken by Powell between 1978 and 2012. Many of his works are also available to view online in the Dan Powell digital collection in Oregon Digital.

Dan Powell received his MFA degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1980. Powell taught in the Art Department at the University of Northern Iowa from 1980-1987 before beginning his current position teaching photography at the University of Oregon in 1988 (retired 2015).  His work has been exhibited widely, at venues such as the Royal College of Art, London; the Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY.  He is in the permanent collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Art Institute of Chicago. Powell’s work has been reviewed in prestigious publications including Art Week, New Art Examiner, Art News, Afterimage, and the New York Times.

This collection of photographs includes nineteen thematic projects of constructed imagery that include composites, hand drawn marks, and hand toning. The collection also includes landscape photography that depict New York, the American Midwest and West, and Europe. The largest body of work in the collection is the Western Landscape series which documents remote high desert landscapes across the Columbia Plateau and Northern Basin and Range in Washington and Oregon.