BUTTERFLIES & BUFFALOS: PART II:  AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT 

BUTTERFLIES & BUFFALO PROJECT OVERVIEW/video

METAL PHOTOGRAPHS

BLURRY NUDE SERIES

DENNISMANARCHY 

Over the past 30 years, Dennis Manarchy has ranked among the world’s top photographers.  Throughout his career,  he has won numerous national and international awards for his work on campaigns from Porsche to Nike to Harley Davidson to Dior. His first book “En Passant” won the prestigious American Graphic Design award and his latest books, “Metal” and “Metal 2” each won Graphis Gold in 2009 and 2010. He is consistently rated in the top 100 photographers of the world and was voted top photographer twice and top commercial director once.    His work has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Zoom, Photo, Life, and Time magazines and most recently in the October 2012 edition of Black and White Magazine.

Dennis Manarchy was raised in the Midwest. His first love was jazz. As fate would have it, he came in late to band practice and the only instrument left was a sax, which he fell in love with. He developed a talent for improvisation and played in jazz bands throughout high school and college.  His next love was photography, which ultimately became his passion.  He won a scholarship to Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Upon graduation he was fortunate to serve an apprenticeship for the legendary photographer Irving Penn. It was a highly disciplined and uncompromising creative environment. Penn became simultaneously a mentor due to his amazing talent and meticulous nature, and a nemesis because it took years for Dennis to break from his influence and really develop his own style. 

Dennis was drafted into the army in 1968. After serving in Vietnam, he found himself anxious about returning to civilian life. He met a Lumbee Indian chief in a North Carolina bookstore, and after sharing his story, he was invited to move in with the tribe. He lived with them for 6 months to re-adjust. This was a pivotal experience and has manifested itself in his latest project, "The Vanishing Cultures: An American Portrait”, focusing on America’s vanishing cultures. 

After leaving the tribe, he returned to the Midwest, opened a studio in Chicago and built an international clientele. "The Vanishing Cultures: An American Portrait" is his current work-in-progress, and certainly his most ambitious. "The Vanishing Cultures: An American Portrait" is a philanthropic mission with the potential to become one of the largest and most powerful cultural and artistic projects in history.  It will be a 20,000-mile journey across North America with the world's largest film camera to document and commemorate over 50 of our nation's cultures before they are gone forever.  This 3-year project will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the camera and will result in stadium-sized exhibitions, film documentaries, educational materials and books that will collectively celebrate film photography and our nation's diverse people.