Dan Winters Photographer to the Stars
While we can certainly take pride in the prose that has graced the pages of South magazine, this has always been a publication defined at its heart by the visual language of photography and design. Bold imagery that evokes a reaction and demands an emotional response has driven this magazine forward since the first issue hit the streets.
As such, it has been our distinct privilege to invite some of the world’s most celebrated photographers to share their work among our pages. The iconic celebrity photography of Dan Winters appeared in our October/November 2012 issue, and the feature that surrounded his work has remained one of our most visually compelling pieces, solely on the strength of his ethereal portraits. As you’ll see in the following spread, his eye captures these recognizable faces in a way that makes them seem wholly new, lit and posed in a way that reflects their public persona while revealing the person within. From celebrated thespians like Morgan Freeman and Tom Hanks, to icons who live in our memory like Heath Ledger and Tupac Shakur, his images leaped off the page.
The occasion for the article came when Winters displayed some of his pieces at The Telfair in a show titled Dan Winters’s America: Icons and Ingenuity, and the Tybee Island part-timer shared with South his surprising views on his artform.
“Truthfully, most of what I do is way more interesting than that. It’s fun to meet actors, and there’s a collaborative process there and people in the integrated visual world get that,” he told South at the time. “But working out in my woodshop or building something in my drawing room or doing collages or sculpture, while autonomous, is a lot more satisfying.”
While the rest of the feature was devoted to his evocative still lifes, collages and slice-of-life photography, it was the celebrity images that have stuck with us over the years as we look back on truly stunning visual moments in South magazine history.
