About Robert Dunn & Ecstatic Light Photos

As a photographer, I’m most interested in making photobooks: taking the best photos I can (all street photos, none staged, most all in New York City), then putting them in the right order, with the right layout, to create the best book experience. I find it hard to see my photographs existing in any way other than in relation to each other and to the book they’re in. So what you’ll see here are a set of my current photobooks (and some forthcoming), with the photographs in the order they are in the books, if not laid out that way.

I come by this fascination with photobooks from my work as a novelist and writing professor at the New School (where I now teach a class in making photobooks), though I have little interest in marrying words and text. The photobooks I most admire—Frank’s The Americans, Klein’s New York, Eggleston’s Guide, Moriyama’s Bye Bye Photography—are solely books of photographs that, in their ordering and their brilliance, tell numerous stories, all profound.

In my own work, I strive for just that wordless flow of image and subtle narrative.

Background photo from a recent book, Grace.

A two-part rave for my photobooks has recently been published on the esteemed art blog NighthawkNYC. Check it out. Part 1 . Part 2 .

My photobooks are in the permanent library collections of MoMA, the International Center of Photography, and the New York Public Library, among others. They are, or have been, for sale at the International Center of Photography bookstore, the Strand Rare Book room, PS1 MoMA bookstore, the New Museum, McNally and Jackson books, Dashwood books, Printed Matter, twelvebooks in Japan, UKPhotobookstore in England, Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Calif., Bluestockings Books in NYC, and Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn.

I also write extensively about photobooks. I review regularly for Photobookstore Magazine. Reviews up to 2020 are here. More recent ones here.

In the summer of 2023 the first book of my writings on photobooks, The Mysteries of Light, was published. Here’s the Amazon link. Other excerpts are under the Writing page. Also just out is Mirrors and Smoke: How I Became a Photographer. Also available on Amazon here. Books are available in print and for Kindle.

More on Robert Dunn here and on Wikipedia.

• Love Japanese photobooks, as I do? Read my three-part Japan Journal for Photobookstore Magazine . I’m hunting down rare books, getting lost daily, and working on my own photobooks. From that trip come the books Lost in Tokyo and Shibuya Time , as well as Star of Light , from a hop over to Bangkok.
• My books are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
• High-quality Duggal prints of photos will be available soon
• We’re bringing our street photos back to the street. Tee shirts available here