In 2011, prize-winning fiction writer Robert Dunn read a review of a new Fuji single-lens-reflex camera, and something clicked. Later that day, although the then-new Fuji X100 was as hard to get as the latest iPhone, he’d tracked one down.

Little did Dunn know his life had changed. He’d always loved photography, and he took his new camera with him everywhere he went. Photographs accumulated, and he began to put them into photobooks.

Mirrors and Smoke is a memoir of finding a new passion later in life. It’s about the bountiful world of photobooks. Most of all, it’s about the way Dunn has learned to see the essence of the world around him in ever greater and more meaningful detail, then take that empathic vision and turn it into art.

Mirrors and Smoke is a book for everyone who has already traced the magical path of becoming a photographer, as well as the simply photography-curious. Read it, then pick up your camera and go hit the streets. There’s a bounty of beauty and revelation waiting for you out there.