Description
In the mid-1960s, Judy Dater began to photograph collaborative performances that she and her subjects staged for the camera. She would come to her subjects' houses and choose appropriate costumes from their closets. The women would then be depicted in the domestic environments they had created, surrounded by props that interpreted their characters. While the domestic setting is subdued in this example, the coiffed hair, made-up face, fur-sleeved dress, and glamorously displayed hands of the middle-aged woman reflect the social and economic privileges associated with Beverly Hills.
Judy Dater
Judy Dater American, 1941-
Known for her powerful portraiture, Judy Dater relies on confrontation, revelation, empathy, humor, and parody to reveal her subjects. Her early 4 x 5-inch, black-and-white photographs reflect the influence of the California-based f/64 school, which included Ansel Adams and, in particular, Imogen Cunningham, whom Dater credits as a mentor. When Cunningham died in 1976, Dater embarked on a project to photograph and interview her relatives and friends, acting as editor for the resulting publication, Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait (1979). Dater's color work includes subjects from Egypt (1979-80) and a series of self-portraits that depict the artist in various guises as a means for critical feminist inquiry (1982). More recently, she has moved to computer-manipulated photography and installation and performance art.
Dater (born Judy Rose Lichtenfield in Hollywood, California) attended ucla (1959-62), where she studied drawing and painting. She met and married Dennis Dater in 1962, divorcing two years later. She continued her education at San Francisco State University, taking up photography as her primary medium (B.A., 1963; M.A., 1966). There, she studied with photographer Jack Welpott, whom she eventually married (1971-77). The two collaborated on the book project Women and Other Visions (1975), often using the same models.
Dater's work has been included in numerous one-person exhibitions, and the de Saisset Museum at the University of Santa Clara organized a major traveling retrospective, Judy Dater: Twenty Years, with accompanying monograph (1986). She has won the Dorothea Lange Award from the Oakland Museum (1974) and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1988) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1978). Dater lives in Palo Alto. A.W.