Daniel Gordon is an American artist who works with photography, collage, sculpture and still life. He was born in Boston in 1980 and grew up in San Francisco. He received a BA from Bard College in 2003 and an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art in 2006. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Gordon builds his pictures in layers. He starts with images, prints them, cuts them out and builds them into temporary three-dimensional paper forms, then photographs those forms again. He is best known for colorful portraits and still lifes made this way. His work was shown in New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (2009), in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2010) and in Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2018). In 2014 he received the Foam Paul Huf Award.
His book Objects at Hand (Radius Books, 2026) collects black-and-white photographs that he began in 2024. They show glasses, kitchenware, cutlery and stationery from his home and studio. Many objects look translucent, but they are opaque paper constructions made from photographs. The book has 164 pages and 72 images. It includes an essay by Kevin Moore and a conversation between Gordon and the artist Lucas Blalock.
