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Overview
"Dan Nelken’s oddly affecting portraits of half-shorn sheep, gawky adolescents clutching prize rabbits, and teenage beauty queens show that the down-home county fair—pooh-poohed for offering both funnel cake and motion sickness—is a bastion of tradition, knowledge, and community that we're often quick to overlook."—Dwell Magazine
“Dan Nelken’s delightful and insightful portfolio—Till the Cows Come Home—is a selection of county fair portraits. It is one of those rare bodies of work that combines a surface ease of viewing with a passionate depth of character and feeling. If one chooses just to enjoy the subjects, then Nelken’s images are seemingly direct and uncomplicated portraits of the participants in some of the thousands of county fairs that make up American rural life. Simultaneously, however, they possess a depth that Walt Whitman first noted over a century before: ‘I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained / I stand and look at them long and long.’ ”—Roy Flukinger, in The British Journal of Photography
It still exists: the small family farm with its own traditions, but it is threatened with extinction. In rural communities and at county fairs across the United States, one can still find it. Dan Nelken, in his portraiture, has recorded the essence of these time-honored ways of living and working. Since 2000, Nelken photographed county fairs throughout New York State, drawn by their simplicity, their moments of tranquility amidst the festivity, and their link to the past. He searched to convey the intimacy, rhythm, and flow of the essence of a cultural phenomenon that is slowly disappearing.
Dan Nelken is a photographer based in New York City. His award-winning work has been exhibited and published in the United States and abroad.