Dan Hallman
Each image challenges the viewer with an initial “Is this a painting, drawing, or photograph?”
Dan Hallman is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, painting, text, and alternative photographic processes. After a career as an editorial portrait photographer in New York and London, contributing to publications including Vanity Fair, Glamour, and Departures, Hallman shifted his focus to a studio practice centered on perception, language, and interpretation. His work explores how meaning is constructed and how images and words can evoke emotion without offering fixed conclusions. Humor, ambiguity, and openness play an important role, inviting viewers to bring their own experiences and associations to the work.
In his practice, Hallman moves fluidly between photography, text-based works, and material experimentation. His ongoing series Textural treats words and short phrases as visual forms rather than statements. Using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, a light-sensitive printing technique, he exposes text and photographs together onto the same surface, physically binding image and language through light. His large-scale photographs are created entirely in-camera, often capturing movement and gesture in ways that prioritize sensation over subject, resulting in images that feel both photographic and painterly.
