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<span class="text"><font color="#444444" class="text"> <p><img hspace="10" border="0" align="right" src="http://slides.sitewelder.com/users/danuta/images/danuta121763T.jpg" alt="" /> Somewhere in the halls of The San Francisco Art Institute, between the sculpture department and the silk-screen studio, I discovered photography. It was the mid-seventies and I was killing time between classes. A professor, Henry Wessel, Jr., was showing his students slides of work by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Garry Winogrand. Before that moment, I thought photography was for geeks, left-brained types with big lenses and SLR's, but the pictures I saw that afternoon required a more intuitive kind of intelligence, the ability to anticipate a moment before it happened, and a state of mind that was both present and detached. This opened up a previously unknown realm of possibilities, and I soon got lost behind the world of a newly acquired range-finder camera. For the next few years I spent my days walking the streets of San Francisco and it's surrounding communities, learning the language of photography, and fine-tuning my sense of 'intuitive recognition'. My nights were spent developing film and looking at hundreds of images. My passion and commitment paid off; in the spring of 1977 my work was included in an exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art. In the show were some of my favorite photographers: Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon. The next ten years brought a major fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts; inclusion in several major exhibitions; an MFA from the University of California, San Diego; and a move to New York City. I have been on the East Coast for over twenty years photographing people for editorial, corporate and advertising clients, and currently live in Washington, DC.</p></font></span><br>
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Danuta Otfinowski. All rights reserved.
