Dan Budnik

An elderly woman, standing at Berlin Wall, in west sector, with hands raised, after waiting three hours to see her East Berlin friends and relatives. Photograph by Dan Budnik

Daniel Budnik (May 20, 1933 – August 14, 2020) was an American photographer noted for his portraits of artists and photographs of the Civil Rights Movement and Native American life.

Career Budnik studied painting at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1950s under Charles Alston, who he credited for inspiring his interest in photojournalism. Sports Illustrated, and Vogue magazines.

quote |text=It was my second day in kindergarten and we were playing marbles. This kid who’d moved up from Alabama leaps up and starts throwing fistfuls of stones at this old black man walking under a tree nearby. I can still hear the sound of them ripping through the leaves. I grabbed him and shook him, asking what the man had done to him. He just started letting off the n-word. ‘He's one of them!’ he said over and over in a crazy rage. I didn't understand how someone who was only five could be poisoned like that. As I travelled to Selma, I had that in my mind. |author=Dan Budnik |source=2014 interview Later, Budnik convinced Life to commission him to create a long-term photo essay showing the seriousness of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, during which he photographed both Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace. However, Life declined to publish his work after devoting two consecutive issues to covering the march using other photographers.

Since 1970, Budnik has worked with the Hopi and Navajo Native American tribes, for which he was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973) and the Polaroid Foundation (1980).

During his career, Budnik has photographed Candice Bergen, Sophia Loren, Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Budnik died on August 14, 2020, at an assisted living facility in Tucson.

Works The Book of Elders: The Life Stories of Great American Indians, as told to Sandy Johnson, photographed by Dan Budnik. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994.