After being rejected from a creative writing class his freshman year, Los Angeles-based photographer Dan Monick was exposed to the art of the camera by Carrie Mae Weems, a prominent African-American photographer whose work has been acknowledged by such New York giants as the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Since then Monick has documented “virtually everything,” as he himself proclaims, influenced by the work of Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and William Eggleston. He is fascinated with the banal, kitsch, and tacky, and the complex stories each object and subject tells about identity and community contingent to location. Monick’s sensibility captures the ephemeral beauty of these anomalies and ironic happenstances, to convey nostalgia in a unique style—one that is anarchic, often humorous, and arresting, highlighting the beauty of such banality in contemporary society.

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