Photographer Robert Dunn, Part 1 — Interviewed by Richard Cobalt Deuxnez, August 2014

Q: So, you’re primarily a novelist, how did you get started in photography?
A: I’ve always been interested, it was just that when I was a starving writer making around a $100 a week at The New Yorker magazine back when, well, I couldn’t really afford to be a serious photographer. I mean, one print would be more than my rent?

Q: So you were only a writer—
A: My passion was literature, reading it, trying to write it. I was besotted by words, no lie. But to become the best writer I could, I had to learn to see as deeply and fully as possible. I recall telling The New Yorker’s poetry editor that I was starting not only to see what was in front of me but also what was behind it, the front and backside of the chair, so to speak. I was training my eye to see everything.

Q: And?
A: She nodded—she understood, kind of patted me on the back. I like to think that intensity of vision is central to being a good photographer.

Q: So your current interest in photo making started—
A: Very simple, really. I read this David Pogue review of the Fuji X100 camera in the Times, and there was a kind of flash—I knew I wanted one, that it could make me a photographer again.

Q: Because?
A: I don’t really know. It just sounded like everything I would want in a camera. I had no particular interest in big-dick Canons or that kind of thing, so I never bothered. The Fuji looked simple, straightforward, cool—and I got one.

The funny thing was, though, that it was as hot as a new iPhone. I camped out on Amazon, one Friday afternoon saw it pop up at a store, called them, realized they were only thirty-some blocks from where I was. The guy said, When can you come get it? Um, after work? O.K., hope I still have one…. I was down there half an hour later.

Q: And?
A: My first photo blew my mind.

Q: Why?
A: There was something about the camera, it didn’t really do what you wanted it to, it did its own thing. Yet what was coming out of it was amazing, beautiful.

Q: That’s the one you still use, right?
A: The only camera. Fixed wide lens, the ability to see what the camera’s seeing—what your photo will be—through the viewfinder. The rich, pure colors. And that way it, well, acts up. I have faith in the camera—sometimes more faith in it than in myself.

Q: You mean—
A: I’ve told people I just wave the camera around, that’s how I shoot my pictures. You know, just wave it about and see what it grabs—

Q: So is that it, your philosophy of photography? Just throw the camera around, see what sticks?
A: [Laugh] Kind of, yeah.

Q: Let’s get a little more serious. You must bring something to the table. Can you tell me about what you’re shooting, how you see it?
A: You mean—

Q: Yeah, what your work is about.
A: How about what my work is? I don’t really like to think what it’s about.

Q: O.K., sure.
A: I’m not so sure about the term street photography these days, it seems a little old-fashioned, but I’ve always loved to walk about the city, and now I take my camera with me and take photos—

Q: On the street—
A: Or right off it, yeah. Here’s the thing: It’s all about how I’m seeing things, how fast I can see, how fast I can snap what I think I see. It’s kind of an existential-moment thing—how about that for an old-school term—where I’m in it, deep and full as I can be, simply watching, reacting, thinking yet letting my impulses kick and jump … hoping to get a good picture when I slam my finger down on the button.

Q: The button? You mean the shutter?
A: I mean the button. You know, the one that makes the camera take a picture.

Q: You’re really not thinking about it much—
A: But that’s what makes it so much fun. It’s pure instinct. It’s walking around the city, in a zone, looking, watching, all senses firing—what’s better than that?

Q: But surely you have some ideas about what you’re doing?
A: I do have some notions of what I don’t shoot.

Q: O.K.
A: No people begging, as a rule, that is. Also, nobody on a smartphone—

Q: Really? Everybody these days is always on a smartphone.
A: I know, it’s a problem. The reason I don’t photograph anybody doing that is, when you’re gazing into that screen, you have no soul.

Q: No—
A: Soul. I can see it. At least nothing that will come through in a picture.

Q: So you’re anti-technology?
A: Absolutely not. I have my iPhone right here, use it all the time when I need it. It’s not that I’m anti-technology, it’s just that I’m pro-soul.

Q: Tell me, is there anything political in your work?
A: Good question. My first book, as you know, was OWS—the protest down in Zuccotti Park that first year I was taking pictures, 2011. I went down there to donate copies of my hippie girl novel, Look at Flower, to the free library, and I stayed around to take pictures.

Q: It’s a good book—
A: Thanks. I went back three times, and found that fewer people were involved in the demonstration, but more and more people had a camera. I can still see it: Everyone shooting this, shooting that. I also noticed that I was pointing my camera in the places nobody else was.

Q: So was that political?
A: I don’t know. In truth, I was just trying to take the best photographs I could. I loved the richness of images and patterns and colors down there. That’s what’s in my book, little of the politics, none of the drama. Just the way people were living in a city square for those months.

Q: Anything else political?
A: I was at the Garry Winogrand show recently, at the Met, and one of the wall boards said he was “capturing the main story of his times.” Well, I wouldn’t mind doing that—I mean, who wouldn’t?—so I asked myself what I was doing, you know, in terms of the “main story of our times.”

Q: And?
A: The thought came to me that the main story of our times is the way all the traditional barriers are coming down, how we’re all melding together. Different races, different world cultures—there are so many here in New York, of course—and all jumbled about on the street. I never set out to show this in any way, but I sure have an awful lot of different people and cultures in my photos from walking about. So maybe I am capturing the “main story of our times.”

Q: What do you think about Winogrand?
A: Admire him hugely. History’s created this idea of these three cool guys, pals, Winogrand, Friedlander, Meyerowitz, standing around on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street creating modern street photography. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

Q: But—
A: It was fifty years ago. Like wanting to be in the Beatles—sure, of course, why not.

Q: What about Robert Frank? You did that little throwaway book, Meeting Robert Frank—
A: You mean, Meeting God?

Q: You’re saying—
A: In a talk Winogrand gave, they had it at the Met on crappy ’80s video, he talks about how he shot the St. Francis cross in L.A. before Frank did. Then, boom, there’s Frank’s photo in The Americans of the same place. The astonishment, dismay, yet honest joy on Winogrand’s face at how great Frank’s photo is compared with his own. That somebody could do that. Wow!

Q: Where does that leave someone today?
A: That’s the question, isn’t it? I’d say for me it’s working to hit a place in photos that hasn’t been hit before. Not strict straight-up street photography like the classic guys did it. That’s been done, pretty much in every way.

But still, especially after seeing the Winogrand show, you realize that a great photo on the street—I think, of course, of the eight people on that bench at the ’64 World’s Fair—is something miraculous.

Q: Something—
A: Yes, really, a miracle. You can’t plan that, can’t even capture it. There are forces in a great photograph, at least an intuited one shot out and about, that are beyond any personal control. Indeed, personal control probably has almost nothing to do with it. You see something, you hit the … the shutter … and then later you see what you have.

By miracle, I mean that this force out there has for a moment gone your way, and there it is in the photo. It’s a surprise, sometimes an astonishment.

Q: I like that.
A: I do, too. You know, that’s a lot of the thrill of photography—the way you surprise yourself, you get more into a photo than was actually there. That’s a Winogrand line, that “more into a photo than was actually there.” I’d add to it: More than you ever imagined could be there.

Q: Nice.
A: That’s it, isn’t it? What more can there be than that? A touch of the miraculous, a whiff of a greater power. It’s all spirit and faith, at bottom. That’s what a great photograph is: the true manifestation of spirit and faith.