By Jeff Vrabel

To call Dan Winters a “celebrity photographer” is to miss much of the story.

It’s understandable that people default to the celebrity hook when describing Winters’ work. His style of portraiture is atmospheric, instantly recognizable and a touch otherwordly; there are shots of Tom Hanks, Tupac, Michael Jordan, Jack White, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leonardo DiCaprio, Heath Ledger, Christopher Walken, a ’50s-inspired version of Laura Dern, lost in some off-camera distance, treated to a desaturated color palette and feeling more permanent and mortal than most ephemeral celebrity photographs.

But if labels are required, then Winters is also an aerospace photographer, an entomological photographer (with a lively interest in electron microscopes), a documenter of America, a chronicler of Texas gang life, a photographer of women in the military, a builder, illustrator and creator of collages and much more. His is a broad, stretching body of work that, he confesses, is frustrating to hear distilled into a guy who takes pictures of famous people.

“The truth is that if I had to do celebrity photos all the time, I’d want to slit my wrists,” the soft but speedy-spoken Winters said from his home outside of Austin, Texas, a few weeks before the opening of his show at the Telfair, Dan Winters’s America: Icons and Ingenuity.

“Truthfully, most of what I do is way more interesting than that. It’s fun to meet actors, and there’s a collaborative process there, and people in the integrated visual world get that. But working out in my woodshop or building something in my drawing room or doing collages or sculpture, while autonomous, is a lot more satisfying.”

Winters’ resume in that integrated visual world is somewhere between astonishing and insane. His work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Time. And his best work will be collected in a new show at the Telfair, part retrospective, part document of a work in progress. “It’s a really great feeling to continue to make work that I’m happy with and proud of, because you worry,” he says. “You worry that you make something that’s special and stands out, and you think, ‘God, am I ever going to do anything like that again? Something I’m more satisfied with?’ You worry. As an artist, you worry.”

Visit the Telfair before November 11 to catch Winters’ work in his first-ever solo exhibition. Admission is free for members or $20 for a three-site Telfair pass.