Force of Nature
Now at the height of his 30-year career, Jeff Dunas has always come at photography ‘full throttle’
by Mark Lapin
Jeff Dunas may not be a nature photographer but he is a natural, and photography has been like a force of nature in his life, sweeping him up at an early age and whisking him off on a whirlwind career during which he has achieved many individual highlights, helped many colleagues and launched one of America’s premier photo festivals.
Completely self-taught in photography and one of the few top-level pros who didn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater when jumping on the digital bandwagon, Dunas has accumulated a host of accolades, including People Photographer of the Year in 2004. He has published eight books of his own documentary, fine-art nudes, celebrity and portrait photography. His images have appeared in over 60 one-person exhibitions around the globe and in nearly every mainstream magazine including GQ, Life, Vibe, Entertainment Weekly, and Esquire.
Dunas has also been very innovative in publishing fellow photographers and promoting photography. Living in Paris in the 80s, while working for French magazines, he founded Collector’s Editions, Ltd., which published 23 books by leading photographers. As a magazine editor, he wrote over 100 interviews with outstanding talents including Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Ralph Gibson, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Deciding to bow out of publishing in 1989, Dunas moved back to Los Angeles and returned to full-time commercial, fashion, beauty, and fine art photography.
In 2005, Dunas drew on his worldwide connections to launch the Palm Springs Photo Festival, which has grown like a magic mushroom and is now acclaimed by legendary photographers, expert reviewers and dedicated amateurs as one of the most inclusive and inspiring festivals in the photography world.
‘People ask me what I photograph and I tell them I shoot everything except landscapes and still-life,’ says Dunas. ‘I extend into a lot of areas but to me, it’s all portraiture. I’m a people photographer. Having done this for so many years has trained me to have a great comfort level with anybody – clothed or unclothed, rich or poor, young, old, famous or unknown. I love the idea that I do all kinds of photography and not the same thing day after day. To me the exciting thing is exploring my whole world with the camera.’

The magic was always there
Dunas grew up in LA in the early 60s and found himself drawn to photography before he hit double digits. ‘Seeing the world through a lens was fascinating to me by the time I was nine,’ he says. ‘I photographed everything, anything– my neighborhood, trees, friends, girls I knew, cars. I had this little darkroom, and I was developing film and making contact prints, and obviously these were not the most spectacular negatives you ever saw. But the magic was there. I also had a buddy who was really into photography. We fueled each other’s interest. He commandeered the Zeiss camera that his father brought back from the war. I got my mother’s Graflex-22 (a classic, all-manual, twin-lens reflex). I don’t know where it came from but the passion was really intense. I just loved it.’

Dunas’ love of looking through a lens may or may not have been related to a genetic accident. He was born with monocular vision, not the stereo vision most of us enjoy. ‘If you close one eye, that’s sort of how I see the world,’ he says. ‘To me, it looks like that tree really is growing out of that guy’s head. So I naturally saw with the dimensionality of the photograph when I gravitated to photography as a kid.’

Nudes were his first love
Dunas’ first and most enduring love in photography has been the female nude, a passion he discovered in adolescence when most of us are looking at pictures of the opposite sex with much less aesthetic aspirations. ‘By the time I was in my early teens, all I really wanted to do was photograph girls.’ he says. ‘I loved the idea of photographing nudes. It was a beautiful thing to do. So, essentially, I devoted the next 20 years of my life to doing that.’

There is, of course, quite a chasm between wanting to photograph a nude and actually convincing an attractive model to disrobe for your camera but Dunas found a way and learned an important lesson. ‘My parents took me to this tennis club, and there was this really beautiful girl by the pool. I guess she was 20 or 22, and somehow or other, I got the courage to convince her to take me, in her car, up to a mountain top and let me photograph her nude in the fields,’ he says. ‘I still have those pictures. They were just terrible. I didn’t know what I was doing but I was just blown away by the fact that I was doing it. That being said, I had taught myself something important: If you can conceive of it, you can do it.’

‘I was never shy’
In persuading the poolside beauty to pose, Dunas drew on his engaging and irrepressible personality, which has become the key to his success in getting all kinds of people to let down their guard for his camera. ‘I was never shy,’ he admits. ‘What have you got to lose? If you have a personality, if you’re kind of amusing, if people aren’t threatened by you, if have a tact and a way of disarming people, making it kind of fun and interesting, if you’re not a threat or suspicious character, you learn to make the most of it. I guess I also appealed to her vanity.’

By his mid-20s, Dunas had landed and walked away from what most young male photographers would consider the dream job—shooting for Playboy. ‘I figured out that if you found a beautiful girl and took her pictures into the magazine, they would probably let you photograph her,’ says Dunas. ‘But I felt very restricted and restrained by their concept. They wanted girls to retain that 1950s presence with red nails and teased hair and matching lingerie and all that stuff that made them look like my mother’s generation. That’s not how I saw girls. Nudes always fascinated me but I always treated the model as the subject of photography, and never with erotic intent or an object. I’m never about the girl; I’m always about the photograph. I never set out to make a sexy picture. The more erotic the picture, the dumber and off-putting it is to me.’

From the skin wars to the publishing biz
Walking away from the skin wars gave Dunas plenty of creative freedom but forced him to find a new place to publish. Typically, he thought big. ‘I loved the concept of photo books, where I could control the whole thing and present a vision of women the way I saw them. My first book, Captured Women, came out in 1981 and was hugely successful. I think it outsold any book in that genre at that time. I’m saying this without the slightest bit of modesty. The upshot was I figured out how the publishing world worked. I created a partnership with publishers in many countries. We printed the first hardcover edition in six languages and sold 120,000 copies. Then another 30,000 in soft cover.’

Dunas was so successful with his own books that he ‘sort of backed into’ the business of publishing other photographers. While living in Paris during the 1980s, he founded Melrose Publishing and two respected magazines, Collectors Photography and Darkroom Photography. ‘But one day in 88, I woke up and realized this is not what I want to be doing,’ he says. ‘Collectors Photography had these extraordinary portfolios and was beautifully printed. I’m very proud that it was groundbreaking in its production characteristics, but it was always a money-loser. I could have cut the quality way down and made it profitable but I couldn’t conceive of it. So I closed it and it and just went back to doing my own pictures again. If you know what you really love doing and veer off course, you’ve got to get back on track.’

Brief, intense and timeless
In his portrait photography, Dunas has displayed the ability to connect almost instantly with an astonishing diversity of subjects from street people and blues musicians to Native American dancers and pampered celebrities. ‘In all my portrait work, I bring a kind of subtext to bear, and the results bear fruit,’ he says. ‘If you have the aesthetic in your head, if you know how you want to approach the project and how the individual portrait is going to fit into a whole body of work, then you’re going into a situation with a solid agenda. You have to come at it full throttle and be able to really dominate the situation with the sitter so much that they hardly realize what’s going on. You kind of hypnotize them for a short period of time, and then they go, having had a great time.’

Dunas has been doing street pictures almost as long as he’s been doing nudes. Recently, he applied his ‘street aesthetic’ to a big job for USA networks, which entailed photographing people in all kinds of situations around Los Angeles, including an 80’s sing-along, a ballroom dance class, a sand castle building contest, a festival of tall ships, a lawn bowling competition, a block party for recovering addicts, a senior talent show, the annual Watts festival and a rodeo.

My modus operandi
‘I’ve always looked at street pictures as portraiture,’ he says. ‘My modus operandi is that I feel very comfortable just blending into a situation, instantly becoming part of it and being swept right up in it. And yet at the same time, I’m very conscious of being an observer and bringing home the bacon. I get in there and get the picture and I’m gone before people realize it.’

When taking commissioned portraits, Dunas creates a ‘brief and intense experience’ for the subject, a technique he developed while photographing a troupe of Native American dancers for Eastman Kodak in the late 80s. ‘I knew that I was going to have only a few, brief minutes with each dancer,’ he says. ‘But I had to be sure that the outcome was good. You don’t just bang away at them because then you come away with a bunch of bland, boring pictures. So I thought about it a lot, and got an image in my head of how I wanted the series to look, how I was going to make the prints, and what I needed to do to get to that point. In my mind, I had the finished, executed image before I took the first photo.’

He later applied the same approach to a series of portraits of blues musicians that resulted in a highly acclaimed book called State of the Blues. Over a five year period, he photographed more than 150 legendary blues artists. ‘Those people were even more difficult to get in front of the camera,’ he says, ‘and I had them sitting for an even shorter period of time. But I had to find a way so that the minute they came in the room, I was simply about getting the image, knowing that I wasn’t going to see this person again. Before you know it, they’re gone. And before they know it, you’ve got something of substance.’

Celebrities
Celebrities would seem to require more delicate handling and ritual courtship with the camera but they, too, appreciate Dunas’ ‘brief & intense’ approach. ‘With celebrities, it’s even more so than with the blues artists or the Native Americans,’ he says. ‘They’re giving me very brief moments of time. The only reason they’re in my studio is because it’s part of a dog and pony show to promote the film or TV show or whatever they’re doing at that time. They’re required to do this, but it’s like pulling teeth a lot of the time. But if you can make it brief and intense, it can be fun. They can dig it. And if the results transcend the usual picture taking, you’ve really impressed them. They always ask: how many shots do you need? It’s not about quantity. It’s about getting the photograph.’

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