About Robert Dunn & Ecstatic Light Photos

As a photographer, I’m most interested in making photobooks: taking the best photos I can (all street photos, none staged, most all in New York City), then putting them in the right order, with the right layout, to create the best book experience. I find it hard to see my photographs existing in any way other than in relation to each other and to the book they’re in. So what you’ll see here are a set of my current photobooks (and some forthcoming), with the photographs in the order they are in the books, if not laid out that way.

I come by this fascination with photobooks from my work as a novelist and writing professor at the New School (where I now teach a class in making photobooks), though I have little interest in marrying words and text. The photobooks I most admire—Frank’s The Americans, Klein’s New York, Eggleston’s Guide, Moriyama’s Bye Bye Photography—are solely books of photographs that, in their ordering and their brilliance, tell numerous stories, all profound.

In my own work, I strive for just that wordless flow of image and subtle narrative.

A two-part rave for my photobooks has recently been published on the esteemed art blog NighthawkNYC. Check it out. Part 1 . Part 2 .

Background photo from a new book, Grace. Other new books such as I Was Just Wondering Around and Sorrow Street are for sale now at the PS1 MoMA bookstore, Dashwood, and other shops.

More on Robert Dunn here and on Wikipedia.

• Love Japanese photobooks, as I do? Read my three-part Japan Journal for Photobookstore Magazine: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I’m hunting down rare books, getting lost daily, and working on my own photobooks. From that trip come the books Lost in Tokyo and Shibuya Time , as well as Star of Light , from a hop over to Bangkok.
• My books are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
• Recent interview with me at Duggal News
• We’re now bringing our street photos back to the street. Tee shirts available here