DICK OTT 

Dick Ott is a professional photographer who lives in Minnesota and works around the world. He has an MA and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Stony Brook in Stony Brook, NY. He was a resident scholar at Cambridge University and the University of Nairobi, Kenya.  He did two years of anthropological fieldwork in Kenya among the Tugen people where he photographed their lives intensively. Ott’s photography education includes courses at the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and BOCES on Long Island, NY. He has taught photography at Century College, White Bear Lake, MN, and at Minnetonka Center for the Arts. He is the owner of Argus Images and has shot numerous commercial assignments over the past twenty years. 

Dick’s early work was made using black and white film, today his images today are done with digital cameras and an archival inkjet color printer. His images are printed with as little manipulation as possible. In his street photography, Dick prefers to shoot whatever is going on around him rather than limit his subject matter by shooting on a project by project basis. Digital photography has given him the freedom to indulge his imagination and to experiment on the street. 

I want to see and photograph as much of the world as possible. There is a desire to make those photographs as telling and evocative as possible so as to draw others into  the seeing and thus bringing their own interpretation to the work. I want to make the ultimate street photograph…an almost impossible quest but perhaps my version of going to the moon?

Ott’s photographs have appeared in numerous solo, and group, shows and have been accepted by many juried competitions around the United States. In 2013 alone, his work was in sixteen shows, of which six were juried and eight were in MN. Ott was accepted 8 times to the Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Exhibit (1981-2008). His work has been shown at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Southampton Museum of Art on Long Island and Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana and Augsburg College in Minneapolis. The latter two were solo shows. His photographs are held in a number of private collections.