Bill Yates
Bill Yates (b. 1946) is a landscape, documentary, and aerial photographer.
Yates graduated from the University of South Florida with a BA in Art and Photography in 1973 following active duty in the US Navy. He received his Master of Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975 where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He also studied with Garry Winogrand as well as other master fine art photographers and enjoyed a forty-year friendship and mentorship with the late painter, sculptor, photographer, and fellow southerner, William Christenberry.
Yates had a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1975. Photographs from that exhibition were curated for the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) first cultural exchange to China following President Richard Nixon's 1972 historic visit. He received an NEA grant to curate and assemble a traveling exhibition of Florida's emerging photographers, was a curatorial consultant for photography to the Corcoran, and served as the director of the University Gallery at New Mexico State University.
Yates’ 2016 book, Sweetheart Roller-Skating Rink (Fall Line Press, Atlanta), won the 2017 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Book Award.
The Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink photographs are the subject of a yearly Stanford University lecture course titled “American Dream—American Nightmare” by noted art historian, author, and chair of Stanford’s Art and Art History Department, Alexander Nemerov.
Yates’ photographs have been included in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, nationally and internationally, as well as private collections and institutions. He is now editing fifty-plus years of his personal work for future books and exhibitions, while continuing to shoot landscape and documentary photography.