Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1942, Dick Durrance was raised in Aspen, Colorado. He studied at Phillips Academy Andover and Dartmouth College, where he majored in art and served as class president and captain of the ski team, among other distinctions.
p>He served in the Department of Army Special Photographic Office in 1967 and 1968 documenting military activities in Southeast Asia. In 1968 his Vietnam pictures won first place (news), second place (feature), and third place (portrait) in the Military Pictures of the Year competition sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association.
In January 1969 Durrance joined the National Geographic photographic staff. Over the next seven years he photographed for stories on South Africa, Leningrad, Alabama, Aspen, Sao Paulo, and the North Sea. He also photographed three landscape books for National Geographic: In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark , The Appalachian Trail, and The Majestic Rocky Mountains.
In September of 1976 Durrance resigned his position at National Geographic to launch a career in corporate and advertising photography. In 1989 his wife, Susan Drinker, joined him in the business of producing photographs for advertising. In 1987, he was voted Advertising Photographer of the Year by his peers in the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP).
In 1993 Durrance and his wife began photographing the quiet, less traveled regions of the national parks and publishing the panoramic images as posters, note cards, and fine art prints. Their national parks pictures, designed to bring the spirit of nature back into daily life, are now distributed throughout the world.
In late 1995 he expanded the horizons of Drinker/Durrance Graphics to include photographing golf courses. He has photographed more than 75 golf courses worldwide and in 2000 he produced the photographs and conducted interviews for a book titled Golfers featuring a wondrous assortment of people who share his love for the game of golf.
