Dan Winters Exposed

Every novelist has lost a much-loved chapter to an editor's discretion, every photographer a favorite image to an art director's cut. They reside for a time in limbo until a book or a magazine or a gallery ushers them into public view. During the 20 years that Southern California-born Dan Winters has photographed for Los Angeles, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, Texas Monthly, and Vanity Fair, it was just part of the process, that growing number of the unseen. Still, he has to admit to a clap of joy when the recent publication of Dan Winters Periodical Photographs (Aperture, 156 pages, $49.95) put eyes on them. "I secretly revel in editors seeing the images," says Winters, "and their looking in the back of the book to find out whom it was shot for and thinking, 'Why didn't we use this?' " Each photograph also brings with it a memory: how during an assignment near MacArthur Park he glanced over at a 1920s building—the Asbury apartments—and the light around it glowed. That with every hour he spent with Fred Rogers his admiration grew, that the days with the legendary TV figure were among the happiest of his life. These images and others will be exhibited at a Fahey/Klein Gallery show, Periodical Photographs, from July 30 through September 5.