Photographer Robert Dunn, Part 2 — Interviewed by Richard Cobalt Deuxnez, Sept. 2014

Q: Last time we talked, it was about how you got started and some of your thinking on your photography, especially the way you use the street. I think we talked a lot about Garry Winogrand—
A: I’d just seen his show at the Met.

Q: Right. Well, I’d like to talk about other photographers who’ve influenced you.
A: Sure.

Q: I’ve heard you’ve been very influenced by modern Japanese photographers such as Daido Moriyama.
A: Absolutely. Daido’s a hero. I’ve met him a couple of times, and each time I told him I think of him as the Bob Dylan of photography.

Q: And?
A: My notion was translated, of course. He laughed, I think.

You know, I can remember vividly when I first saw Daido’s work. It was at the ICP bookstore, a friend working there pointed him out to me—“Do you know this guy? You might like him.”

The thing was, all this was new to me, great photographers beyond the standard Western canon. That was the thrill: Discovery not only of great work, but of how that work slapped my own ideas upside the head, inspired me, opened up new ways to shoot.

So I’m standing there and I see one of Daido’s blurry photos, and I can’t get enough. I start buying his books, anything I can get my hands on, especially the Provoke Era stuff, poring over them, the feeling, the freedom, the soft of fuck you of it all. Genius.

Q: Other influences?
A: Well, as my friends at Dashwood, ICP, Mast Books can tell you, I’ve become quite a collector of photobooks. I respond to all kinds of work, but mostly photographers who show me something new to me that makes sense to me. You know, you feel it right away, deep.

Q: But you’re not—
A: Imitating anyone? I hope not. It’s more inspiration, ideas … you know, most of all, work to test my own against. As I said in that previous interview, I loved it when Winogrand says that a Robert Frank photo, the St. Francis cross at the end of Sunset Boulevard in L.A., that came after one he took of the same street corner—how the Frank photo blew away his own. Likewise, I’m always thrilled when I see somebody doing something way better than me.

Q: Such as?
A: I recently got that long time a’comin’ Steidl book of Saul Leiter’s early black and white photos. The book of interior ones … the deep soul in those portraits, I just can’t imagine—

Q: Deep soul, you say. I know you’ve written a novel about soul music, Soul Cavalcade. You must use the term—
A: Carefully, I hope. That’s that thing with all art. At bottom it hits a level of deep soul. Daido and Dylan. Robert Frank and, I don’t know, Carl Perkins or Charlie Parker. Walker Evans and maybe the Beatles—classicism reinvented as revolution….

Q: Interesting. And what about Evans?
A: I have this book, Photographing America, just a collection of Evans’s and Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the U.S., from all their ramblings. I keep it close to my desk, and often before I head out with my camera, I flip through it. It … it grounds me somehow.

I’m of course not looking to emulate any of these people, just pick up their vibe. Freshen up my own eyes with theirs. Especially if I’ve been writing fiction in the morning—looking at Evans, Frank, Daido, all of it, that can shift me over, get my head in a more visual place.

Q: I can think of two other prominent fiction writers who were known as photographers, Eudora Welty and Wright Morris—
A: You know, I studied with Wright Morris.

Q: Really?
A: Yeah, in grad school at San Francisco State. An independent study writing thing. I met with him no more than three times, and I was an idiot—I didn’t take it seriously. Can’t even remember what we talked about.

Q: Weren’t you also living in the Haight Ashbury house of the eminent Lost Generation novelist Kay Boyle.
A: I was, yeah, I was her live-in gardener. Hah. World’s worst gardener. But I did talk to her, about her pals Hemingway and Joyce. I also put her in my novel Look at Flower.

Q: So, yes, could you say more on the differences between writing fiction and taking photos?
A: I try not to think too much about it, you know, just do it. But I like to think the two acts are sympathetic. I also like to think I’m telling some kind of story in my photobooks, even if there’s almost never a literal narrative. To me, there’s a connection between each photo, a story building—each photo in its right place. That’s very important.

Q: But in terms of the way you think—
A: Good question. Somehow it’s all the same, yet different. I don’t know if I can be of much more help than that.

Q: All right. Let’s see, how about painters. Visually, have you been influenced—
A: Good question. From my teens on I did everything I could to try to become the best novelist I could be, but besides reading everything I could—and should—have read, I spent a lot time in museums looking at paintings. My first Europe trip—age 24, Eurail Pass, green backpack, sleeping bag, youth hostels, that kind of thing—I went to every museum I could. I’d go to the Uffizi in Florence, for instance, first thing in the morning, then leave as soon as it became congested with tourists.

Q: So what had the most impact on—
A: Everything, really. But I remember being particularly struck by Velazquez in the Prado, Las Meninas, and Goya in Toledo. The vibrant sense of detail and color in Velazquez, and the swirling mysticism of Goya. That was my first encounter with truly great art, because the thing was, I’d gotten a cheap airline ticket that went from Mexico City to Madrid, so Spain was my first stop.

Q: And then?
A: On around the continent. But for my own work, I’d say Rembrandt, for the sheer weight and power of his genius—that inexplicable thing that brings each painting to such vivid life. Also from the Netherlands, Vermeer. Everybody of course loves Vermeer, but I was most struck with his gentleness and his color choices. You can see a bit of his palette in some of my photos. Then there’s Whistler. I can still recall all these years later standing in front his Nocturnes in the Tate in London, absorbed by the minimalism, the shadings, the invocation of subject by the subtlest of implication. His Thames scenes, primarily washes of color … washes of emotion.

Q: You—
A: Got a lot from that, yes indeed. My own sense of abstraction, of the quietest glimpse of the human in a flood of colors.

Q: We’ve been talking a lot about influences. How important do you think they are?
A: Well, I do believe we learn by looking, getting ideas, asking from another work of art a kind of validity—and hope you receive it. When I first saw a Daido Moriyama photobook, I suddenly realized 1) a new way my own pictures could go, forget focus, forget level, forget the frame, forget almost everything; and 2) I felt a validation for both my instincts and where my work wanted to move along to.

That said, influences take you only so far. As I’m hardly the first to say, the only true way to figure out what your work is going to be is to go out and shoot it. Shoot a lot. Don’t think too much about what you’re doing. Let the camera surprise you. Heck, let the streets surprise you.

Who knows what you’re going to find when you’re out on what I call a photo-ramble. That’s much of the point. You take your camera, go out and wander about, eyes wide, finger ready, and see what’s what—and what you as an artist can do with it.

That’s the joy, the energy, the thrill of photography, at least for me. Looking at other artists can prime the pump, so to speak, but you have to execute out there all on your own—and understand, of course, that everybody does it his or her own way.

Q: What if you do take a picture that reminds you of another photographer? Does that happen? What do you do?
A: Interesting question. Yeah, that can happen. I’m out walking around, see something that grabs me, shoot … and later it’s clear the photo is a little too recognizable—hmnn, that could be a Winogrand, that a Christer Strömholm.

Q: So what do you do?
A: Try not to worry it too much. In truth, I took the picture. I guess it’s a matter of degree. If it’s just too imitative, well, I trash it. If it has hints of another’s work, well, there is a tradition out there.

I mean, I often find myself drawn to a good flag photo. There’s a huge electric flag in Times Square, and I’ve shot in front of it a number of times. One reason is that Times Square is a rich field for the kind of pictures I’m interested in. The other is, well, I’m a true-blue American in my way, and I feel the flag—its colors, its shape—has great power. Of course, Robert Frank seems to have felt that way, too. Would I use flag images to separate chapters in a book? No chance. But would I let the fact there’s a flag—or, pace Moriyama, a vivid pair of lips—in one of my photos condemn it? Probably not … but it depends.

Q: I’m sensing that the thrust of this interview is, well, influences, and how you see your work fitting into a tradition—
A: Exactly. I was feeling that, too. I love that word tradition.

Q: So there it is. Tradition? History? Or being novel for novelty’s sake? Pushing boundaries? All that stuff … what’re your thoughts?
A: Well, I—no artist—wants to repeat what’s been done. And I—and any artist—well, it has to be about what’s most true to your own vision, your own ideas of the world, the way your art can fit into the world, perhaps nudge it a little—

Q: But—
A: But for me it’s important to be in a tradition. When I first got interested in photography, I read Joel Meyerowitz’s history of street photography, Bystander, and I learned a lot—got a lot of ideas.
Now I don’t want to imitate anyone there, but I’d love to do work good enough to be in a future book of that sort. To be part of the tradition. That would mean a lot. To run down the wide road of tradition—that wide, straight road, like U.S. 285 halfway through The Americans. That road. Yes it would.