John Dugdale

John Dugdale (born 1960 in Connecticut) is an American art photographer. He is known for creating cyanotype prints as he started to lose his eyesight. His works are the focus of the book The Clandestine Mind, Volume III of The Journal of Contemporary Photography series published by 21st Editions.

Early life and career Dugdale's interest in photography started at the age of twelve with his first camera, which was a present from his mother. He attended the School of the Visual Arts in New York City where he majored in photography and art history. In 1983 his photographic work was first presented in a solo exhibition at Vienna's Molotov Art Gallery. The show and the catalogue were curated by Christian Michelides. Thereafter he started a successful decade long commercial career working for such clients as Bergdorf Goodman, Martha Stewart, and Ralph Lauren.

Blindness In 1993, at age 33, Dugdale became nearly total blind due to a stroke and CMV retinitis, an HIV-related illness. He became completely blind in his right eye and lost eighty percent visibility in his left eye. In 2010 he lost his remaining vision.

Blindness ended his successful commercial photography career, but he decided to persist in photography and started to explore techniques from the 19th century for fine art photography, in order to use older, less harsh photochemistry, and enlisting friends and family as assistants.

New use of old photography Since then Dugdale has worked with large format cameras, creating cyanotype prints – platinum prints – using the albumen process which became the predominant technique for positive photography from 1855 to the turn of the 20th century. His sensibility for bygone techniques emphasizes the poetics of his work and the transcendence of time and place; seemingly transporting the imagery to a different era. A quote of the nearly blind photographer: "The mind is the essence of your sight. It's really the mind that sees."

Dugdale has exhibited in over 25 solo shows in galleries all over the world. One of the better known solo exhibits was called Lengthening Shadows Before Nightfall (1995).