College of the Pacific
Daniel Kasser Biography
Biographic Summary
Daniel Kasser's development as a visual artist is, as most are, a complex evolution that reflects his formative experiences, education and intellectually diverse interests. His interest in the cultural, environmental and technological history of the landscape and the American west has provided the subject and subject matter for his work as a photographer for two decades.
Daniel's photographic style has evolved from West-coast, Northern California modernism, exemplified by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, toward a pictorial and poetic approach that is unique among contemporary photographers. Critics have identified Kasser's photographs as "constructed realities" and invocations of myth, comedy and tragedy. In Kasser's recent works, Technosites, he challenges photography's verisimilitude, and our visual and perceptual threshold of the western landscape and landscape photography. Kasser uses the constructed photograph as a narrative device to interpret the landscape and its bounty: the results reveal a symbolic terrain and new chapter for the survey of Western landscape photography. In the Technosites Kasser amplifies commonplace artifacts, the "detritus of the empire," calling upon us to consider the continual and monumental impact that these agents of change have had upon the appearance and ecology of the western landscape. More recently, Daniel's work, particularly the Technosites, has been aligned with the emerging Ecopoetics movement.
Daniel received his Master of Fine Arts in photography from the University of New Mexico and completed undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University and Shasta College in Northern California. He joined the faculty at the University of the Pacific in 1985 teaching photography, print making and studio art seminars. A largely unknown part of his work has been devoted to a longitudinal document of Downtown Stockton were he lives. He has conducted public workshops on several aspects of photography and his gelatin-silver printing/toning techniques; he has undertaken historically related consultation and photographic archive projects; and he has curated and juried several exhibitions of visual art and photography within the Northern California region.
Daniel's photographs are held by numerous private and public collections. He is a member of the Viewpoint Gallery Sacramento, CA and the Knowlton Gallery Lodi, CA. where examples of his work can be viewed and purchased. Inquiries from this site will be directed to the artist. Or visit Daniel Kasser's Web Site: http://www.Danielkasser.com/