Surfer Perth

David Burdeny (b. 1968. Winnipeg, Canada) graduated with a Masters in Architecture and Interior Design and spent the early part of his career practicing in his field before establishing himself as a photographer. Burdeny translates his intimate appreciation for the structure, details and metaphorical value of space into sublime observations on how the contemporary world is still pregnant with mystery and potential. His early work of square-format black and white images rendered space in stark, elemental terms. The spare landscapes seemed modeled to serve as liminal spaces -as thresholds and portals and points of departure that lead the viewer to a complex intimacy with the expressive force of empirical awareness. In subsequent series, Burdeny has explored both opulent and austere interior scenes that use the sensuality of colour to full effect. Whether focused on ordinary spaces or iconic settings, Burdeny's photographs occupy an artistic middle ground between the physical and the atmospheric, the concrete and the spiritual, the actual and the idealized. They represent not strictly what he found but his personal experience of these enigmatic and luminous locations.Burdeny has featured his photographic series in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the US and throughout Europe. His work has also been widely published including most recently in The Guardian, the Corriere Dela Sera and the Moscow Times.David Burdeny lives in Delta, B.C. and works from his studio in Vancouver.

Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.