Dick Blau
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Dick Blau | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1943 |
Dick Blau (born 1943) is a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a photographer and film maker, and a figure in the study of photography of the family [1]
Blau was born in 1943. His mother is actress Beatrice Manley, his biological father the painter Albert Freedberg, and his adoptive father is the theater director Herbert Blau, who raised him from the age of six.[2] His longterm partner is Jane Gallop, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Together they have two children, Max and Ruby.
Education
Blau holds a BA in English from Harvard University (1965) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University (1973). His doctoral thesis was titled, The body as ground of being in four novels of Herman Melville[3] (later published as The Body Impolitic by Editions Rodopi, 1979).[4]
Career
Blau is a professor of film in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His photographs and films have been exhibited internationally and are included in a number of museum collections.
His interests include portraiture, family dynamics, music and dance, gesture, ritual, and celebration.
Although Blau is best known for his work as a visual ethnographer, his photographic portraits of domestic life have appeared in the art tabloid Theory/Flesh;[5] a 2009 Intervalles issue on Interdisciplinary Transcriptions;[6] and the edited collection The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Demeter Press, 2011).[7] Along with Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, and Nancy Honey, Dick Blau has been noted as one of the greatest modern photographers of children because his portraiture goes beyond "the stalling dichotomy of innocence versus corruption" (Libby Brooks, The Guardian).[8][9] (See Also: Pictures of Innocence by Anne Higonnet, Thames and Hudson, 1998).
Films
Some of Blau's films include Up the Block One Sunday (1982), Tintinnabula (1986), and Jidyll (1990), all of which are currently distributed by Canyon Cinema.[10][11]
Screen performances
Blau performed in films by several significant directors. He narrated James Benning's Used Innocence (1989),[12] played Hamlet in Robert Nelson's Hamlet Act (1982),[13] and appeared in Stuart Sherman's Fish Story (1983).
