Honestly, I have no idea how I became a photographer.

O.K., it’s probably a good idea not to trust anyone who begins a sentence with honestly, but that’s just the way the first sentence came to me; and the longer I write and take photos, the more I trust what simply comes to me. What’s unavoidable, what’s simply there. And it’s true: I really don’t know how I became a photographer. Indeed part of the reason to write this book is to go over what happened, to talk about how I came to take pictures, got reasonably good at it, and became inspired enough to set down my tale. And along the way maybe understand how it all came to pass.

I do know how I became a novelist, which I’ve been for all of my adult life. I was eighteen and sitting on a beach in San Diego, California, reading Moby Dick, when I came to a sentence so astonishing and beautiful I actually saw light pour down from the heavens. Yes, a sheet of sparkling light flowing down above me. I don’t know how else to explain this other than as a religious experience, light ecstatic, the power and magic of words opening up new visions, new worlds.

I began to write back in those late-teenage years with new fervor, though it wasn’t for another near decade until I actually completed a novel. Back in those early days simply filling up pages was a tough, hard climb. The blank page of paper sitting in my typewriter (just the same as the blank page on my computer today) . . . what do I do? Where do the words come from? The story? Characters? Sentences then paragraphs?

I can’t recall all the feints and starts, just that I somehow trained myself all those years ago to get up each morning and write. No matter what. Cross-legged on the floor, my typewriter on a turned-to-its-side speaker cabinet, when I was poor and lost between college and grad school. Then at my desk in my first New York City apartment, when I moved there in my mid-twenties and ended up in a turn-of-the-19-century three-room tenement in the East Village, bathtub in the kitchen, for $90 a month. Yes, ninety dollars a month rent. It was a wonderful flat most of the time, the whole top of the Empire State Building gleaming out my front window, though there were times when the heat went out in winter, and to keep writing I’d have to run my hands under hot water in the sink to warm them up enough to hit the keys of my typewriter.

(Curiously, my apartment, at least all the actual fixtures and furniture in it, ended up as a set in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Long story short: I was being booted out for no longer actually living there, the landlord was going to gut the place to refurbish it, and a production assistant for the film who had somehow photographed the apartment, catching Kubrick’s interest, bought everything in it for $100 and had it shipped to England, where it ended up as the set for the prostitute Tom Cruise has an affair with. Yep, my sink, my stove, my cabinets . . . just not my flimsies hanging above the claw-foot tub.)

The apartment, of course, didn’t make me a photographer, though being a writer possibly did. I’ve always seen the best photobooks as a form of literature, and I try to bring my own understanding of how I write novels to every photobook I create.

What do the two disciplines share? At bottom, the job of a novelist, after telling a good story and creating strong characters, is to make us take in the world as richly as possible: all the creatures in it, the good and the evil, and all the complexities in-between. As Joseph Conrad put it: “My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.”

Likewise with the serious photographer. The task is just that: to use our images to rouse all the senses; yet above all, to make us see.

I recall a lunch years ago with the then Knopf editor, later New Yorker magazine poetry editor, Alice Quinn. I was still in my twenties, and doing everything I could to become a better writer. I told Alice, “I think I’m starting to see not only just what’s in front of me, but also what’s behind that.” I moved my hands in a circle. “I’m starting to see the whole thing.”

Alice simply nodded and said, “Good.”

How do you see not only what’s in front of you? How about imagination. Obviously, imagination is key for a fiction writer, because you’re telling stories that only exist in your own mind, inventing nearly everything as you go along. I don’t think most photographers think about their craft this way. They see their task as taking a picture of what’s before them. I mean, what else can you do? You move the camera, focus the lens, set the aperture, snap the shutter; what you or the camera is pointed at is what you get.

So where does imagination come in?

The lesson I learned from Alice Quinn was to see not just what’s there but what could be there. To see around corners. To see shadows and depth. Above all, to imagine what’s about to happen so you can photograph what does happen.

To imagine worlds, then fill them.

That’s what I’m always trying to do with my photography. In my shots, I often like a dreamy quality, something Impressionistic, even Expressionistic (using art history terms cautiously). On the street I’m always trying to be ahead of the shot, anticipate it if I can, or at least be ready and fast enough to capture the most interesting photograph possible.

In my work, I’m not imagining something then setting out physically to create it so I can shoot it. My work is not that realistic or rational. No, this quality of imagination in photography is something more mystical, fluid, amorphous, evanescent.

What it comes down to is that the more of what’s before me that I can see, or simply intuit, the more I can get into a photograph. What I’m calling imagination is the ability to see all that is not there in the midst of what is.

If by following imagination the photo is richer, more magical and interesting, then I’m doing my job.

I’m making you see.

I finally found three hours to myself and sat down to the read the story of how Bob Dunn became a photographer. It was the most pleasant and riveting three hours I’ve had all month. How wonderful to do nothing but be lured into a good story.

Mirrors and Smoke hits on a universal photographer level while the details make it personal and fun.

I loved hearing your voice so clear in this book.

—Sandra Wong Geroux, photographer.