Living With His Camera
“Since the 70s, artists like Nan Goldin, Dick Blau and Robert Mapplethorpe have used photography to challenge our cultural ambivalence towards images of children. Their project has been to overthrow the 18th-century Romantic idealisation of childhood in art, which fetishised children for what they were not: not sexual, not knowing, not polluted by adult experience, and, in so doing, to challenge the viewers’ interior sense of what childhood ought to look like.”—
Libby Brooks, guardian.co.uk, July 2012
“The greatest modern mappers of children’s bodies - Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Nancy Honey, Dick Blau, in extremis the Chapman brothers - locate their examination beyond the stalling dichotomy of innocence versus corruption.”
—Libby Brooks, The Guardian, October 2007
Bright Balkan Morning
“Dick Blau’s amazing photographs give the book a sense of presence, the intimacy of people viewed close up and distant, always lovingly, with respect and with awe. There’s an inviting pulse here, an energy and inwardness that take human shape; rapt bodies register and make palpable an unheard music. Blau’s camera dances with its subjects and makes them real.” —Alan Trachtenberg, author of Reading American Photographs
“As with his photographic contributions to Polka Happiness, Dick Blau observes a landscape still lodged in another distant time with the unsparing eye of August Sander. His pictures of parades, weddings, wrestling matches and local musicians document vivacious life crammed with noise and glee where other cameramen might only see squalor.” —Richard Henderson, The Wire, 224 (UK) October 2002, p. 79
“Dick Blau’s gorgeous black and white photos – portraits, urban landscapes, and shots of social gatherings –provide a strong sense of place…” —Peter Margasak, The Chicago Reader
“Well, let’s acknowledge that Dick Blau has, as photographer, created an ethnographic portrait that could stand alone without any text at all. The pictures of the Rom here are worthy of being exhibited in a gallery in one of the global cities, say London. He has photographed the members of the village of Iraklia, a Balkan community of which five thousand members are Rom! This means that the Rom are not the often despised minority that they are elsewhere. And the photos of the Rom capture everything from a group at a coffee-cup stand to wedding processions with crowds beyond count!” —Green Man Review (greenmanreview.com)
Polka Happiness
“[A]n inspiring account, with strikingly eloquent photographs … based on material collected over twenty years… This is research con amore.” --Popular Music
“The collection of 150 color and b&w photos of Poles having the time of their lives at weddings, nightclubs, festivals and parties needs only the accompaniment of the accordion to make the experience complete for readers.” —Publishers Weekly
