Robert Dunn – Ink and Blood – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

I thought I qualified as prolific. I have three, possibly four, new photobooks coming out this year, for a career total of seventeen, if you include the zines. It is not a competition of course, and not all photobooks are created equal. But check out Robert Dunn’s Ecstatic Light Photo books and start counting. You have to scroll, and you may lose count, as I did. But if I got it right, he has sixty-three published books, plus a couple of books of writing about photography. Geez. There are well-known publishers who produce only a handful of books a year. Sixty-three?

Dunn has addressed the question of how many books he has made, and since he explains it better than I can I include the link here.

The titles are great too: Devil or Angel, Taylor Swift Doesn’t Own the Color Red, Absolutely 28 Goldfish, The Way She Smiles, House of Pain, Cool Struttin’, Abyss Above / Abyss Below, and, my favorite, Furious Palms. On the website, if you click on a book you can see all the page spreads too – the entire book, not just a tease to make you want to buy it to see more. How generous can you get?

I was looking at his books recently and spotted a new one – actually a couple of new ones – and took a closer look at Ink and Blood. It is no mere zine: one hundred pages and an even hundred photographs as well.

What is it about? Is it about blood and ink? Well, there is a photo of a woman with some (probably fake) blood on her face, and several images of tattoos. Otherwise it is a collection of Dunn’s edgy street photographs. His images range from portraits, candid as well as collaborative, in single shots and series, to blurred, semi-abstract panels of liquid color and movement, to details of things seen – tattoos, a dinosaur T-shirt, reflections in windows, silhouetted shadows, Anderson Cooper edging by in a crowd, you name it.

If it looks interesting, Robert Dunn photographs it. His approach is both calculated and improvised. He looks for certain things, certain situations, colors, and patterns, and then fires away. Shoot first and look later. And if it works, it’s all good, it’s all visually interesting.

I have looked at only a few Robert Dunn photobooks, but I can make some generalizations based on those I have seen. For starters, they are not meant to be precious objects, ready for a museum or a collector’s shelf. They are the photobook equivalent of City Lights’ Pocket Poets series – accessible and affordable. And they take risks. They do not include just one style of photo. You are offered a variety of themes and pictorial approaches that are there for you to enjoy. Typically there is no text. Dunn is not interested in telling you what to think. He expects you to open your eyes. There may not be a Concept (though for some Robert Dunn books there is), but there is always Flow. The editing and sequencing do things to you; they take you someplace. They set up a visual rhythm, an ocular movement of colors, patterns, subjects, textures, details, lights and darks. Dunn is interested in what things are but perhaps more in how things look – especially how they look in a book.

Hmm. Here’s a thought. As a safety precaution, maybe photobooks like Robert Dunn’s Ink and Blood should carry a warning label, “CAUTION: Contents May Be HOT.”

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

PhotoBook Journal previously reviewed Robert Dunn’s Tokyo Cool.

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Robert Dunn – Ink and Blood

Photographer: Robert Dunn (born in 1950; lives in New York)

Language: English

Design: Jack Chill

Printing: Mixam

Printed softcover; perfect binding; 100 photographs; 100 pages; 8 x 10 inches

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