MY AFFAIR WITH DIANA photographed by Daniel Grant
In the photographic series My Affair with Diana, Daniel Grant captures compelling vignettes of women using a Diana: a mid-century plastic camera embraced by contemporary artists for its simplicity of use, expressive results, and iconic square format. He used the same camera while traveling through the United States, Mexico, and Europe and found the photographs it produced favorably unpredictable: alternately crisp, then unfocused; moody, then stunning. These qualities prompted his use of the Diana for this photographic essay on the female form and the symbolic embodiment of the feminine as muse. The bodies he photographs morph from shadowed to brilliant, hard-edged to soft, as the arbitrary focus and pinhole vignettes characteristic of the camera lend at one moment a dramatic chiaroscuro and at another a dreamlike pictorialism. Equating the Diana with a lover, the series title hints at the shifting landscape of intimacy ― and implies that the greatest love affairs are those between artists and their work.
