Cheryl Dunn: 20 Year Issue
Photos by Elena Saviano.
This interview appears in the 20th-anniversary Issue (buy a copy here) and is apart of the Analog To Digital: 20 Years of Culture and Change Podcast Series (listen to it here).
Cheryl Dunn is into keeping things.
She photographs, documents, pins things to the wall, prints things in chemicals, and holds them close. In her pictures and films she keeps creativity, memories, times, moments, people, places, things, and makes them preserved. It’s a noble thing, keeping everyone’s lives - their art shows, their friendships, their crowd surfs, their nudity, their crying fits and their everything - and lucky for everyone, Cheryl does it well.
Her style of documentation scratches at the surface of her subject and brings out a vulnerability from beneath, like chipping the corrections off of a painting to reveal the original below. Whether shooting her friends or a festival, there is an emotional intelligence in her imagery and perspective - something palpable in the eyes and the air of her subject that says ‘this feeling is real, this face is mine, this is only happening once, I love it.’
At her studio in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Cheryl and her three-legged cat work away at producing photo books and documentaries and all of the things that people like me consume like starving arty rabbits, and that’s where we met for this interview.
Where are we?
We are in my studio on East Broadway in New York City, Downtown.
How long have you been here?
I moved here the summer of the pandemic. I had a nice loft in Lower Manhattan for thirty years, but the guy sold the building and I escaped out right before that. We were all trying to figure out the shit show market, so I looked at two listings and I hung out around here anyway. My loft was filled with everything I ever made, and everything everyone left there over the years. It was nice to not be around my archive which requires some care taking. I want to move forward, I don’t want to take care of the past all the time.
That’s actually one of my biggest observations of you, you are a documenter. You expose people and archive people in interesting ways. Do you feel a responsibility to do that?
I mean I studied art history in university, not thinking that it’d be something that I ever do, but then a few years later I was like, ‘I guess I do use my college education.’ My cat is munching on something. My three-legged cat, Billy Hill.
Hey Billy.
I think it was just instilled in me that moments of inspiration and creation are fleeting and fascinating, and particularly when an artist is younger and aren’t tainted by the business of art - it’s a display of the pure need for humans to be creative and make things, that’s really interesting to me. I always thought it was important to document.
What drew you to photography and filmmaking initially?
My mother was a housewife, but she photographed everything and made 8mm films of everything. I had a document of every notable and mundane thing we did, and trips, new dresses, gymnastics meets - boxes and boxes of photos and videos in our house that we’d look at. That was just normal to me, so I just did the same. When I got a decent camera in high school, I documented my mundane life. I got out of school and worked in fashion a little bit. I worked on a shoot and was like, ‘maybe I could try to do this.’ I had a boyfriend at the time who got scouted to be a model in Milan, so I said fuck it and moved to Milan to try and be a photographer. I moved to Europe for three years.
What gave you the confidence to do that?
Naivety. I mean, you can eat a bowl of pasta and a glass of red wine for a dollar fifty a night. It was really cheap, so I could survive there on hardly any money. It was pretty lonely, my boyfriend at the time went to Japan so I was in Milan by myself, I didn’t speak the language. But at the time, I was twenty two, it’s a good thing to yank yourself out of your social context where things are comfortable to really analyze yourself. It’s like a secondary school like, ‘I live in a country by myself, don’t speak the language, all I do is read books, walk the streets, go to museums, and observe.’ I had no way to communicate with people, so I just watched. It was a real good way to grow up fast and understand the value of things that sometimes get clouded by your social activities-
Like the scene?
Yeah, and I’m so guilty of it now.
But you’re good at jumping around and being a diplomat across scenes. Do you think that that’s due to your experience in Europe?
Maybe. When you hone your observational skills, and what you do is storytelling, you pay attention to people’s energy. You pay attention to the room, so when you see someone that is over there by themselves and they feel weird or don’t know anybody, you go up to them and say something funny and break that awkwardness, you can bring them into the fold. You can connect people and learn about them and bring them in.
This is becoming very oddly motivational, especially for the shy ones like me. I think that I picked up a camera because it gave me a task and a purpose in social settings. Is that a social lubricant for you?
Absolutely, it’s a door, a window, it’s a shield. I’ll walk down the street with a Leica and strangers will come up and want to tech talk. It is all of those things. And then, when you encounter gnarly shit - my 9/11 experience, I’m sure I was traumatized but not as traumatized by other people that I was with because I had a mission and a camera in my hand. In that respect, it was a shield. It was something put between me and this horrific scene and my emotional state. I had a mission and an obligation, I felt. My eyes are seeing this and I am capable of communicating what I am seeing, and it won’t go through the filter of big media, and that experience really showed me that [possibility]. This is my reality on the street, half a block from this thing. These are these people’s realities and it is very different from what you’re seeing on TV.
Do you feel that same sense of responsibility with general street photography and documentation?
It depends on what's going on. I felt that during the Black Lives Matter protests. I make films which take a lot of time, but I wish I could just walk on the streets all day every day. I have to pick and choose when I go out and what I shoot. I don’t know, history is an interesting thing. Like, I’m sure there are things that you wish you took pictures of fifteen years ago, or more recently. You just never know what will be the thing. There are some things that I wish I shot the shit out of, and the things that I did shoot the shit out of, people now hit me up for. Like the black out in 2003, people ask if I have footage of that and I’m like, ‘yeah I do, three hours worth.’
Three minidv tapes’ worth.
Oh, yeah. Generally speaking, I think it’s like, twenty years after things happen, people want to make movies. When I was documenting the Beautiful Losers thing, I was like, ‘someday I’ll make a film about this,’ thinking about when history becomes history.
I mean, I saw a documentary about the January 6th insurrection about three months after it happened. Speed of light. What were you doing in 2003?
Hm.. what was I making?
It's interesting that you measure time by what you were making.
I mean, I could go back in my journals and tell you exactly what I was doing at that point, but for the most part, I judge time on what I was making and where I was living. Actually, twenty years ago, because we just mentioned it, the black out in New York City was in 2003. That’s where I was.
What was that like?
The lights went out at about four o’clock on a really pretty day and I was like, ‘oh shit, it’s gonna get crazy!’ So I got my video camera and I had a light charged up and I went up to A Life on Orchard to meet friends. It was, I think, my favorite New York City night of all time.
Damn, really?
Yeah, it was wild. Some people had bummer stories but people for the most part had really fun stories. I think everyone was like, ‘this can get really gnarly, or it can be really fun,’ so most people stayed really positive and had a great time. Everyone realized their steak was gonna go bad, so people were cooking it up on the street and giving it away. People were giving out steak and ice cream that was going to melt, bon fires were popping up, it was great.
So on that night-
Oh, I ran into Jake Phelps.
Was he passing out steaks?
I couldn’t see him but I heard him. I have his voice on my tape. He sees me talking to Dash [Snow] and then I hear my name being called and it’s Jake Phelps, so I start screaming his name, too. We find each other and he’s like, ‘who is your boy toy?’ and I’m like, ‘what?’ and Jake was like, ‘the guy with the hair,’ and it was Dash [Snow]. Dash was like nineteen, no shirt on, this blond hair flowing. Then we took pictures and people were skating over bodies, and I lost him.
If you could go back and give your 2003 self a piece of advice, what would it be?
Last time, I said to save your money, and I’m not going to say that again.
I mean, that’s not bad advice.
Yeah, you’re right. I remember my niece was like twenty and working at a magazine, and she was like, ‘I need to ask for a raise, I’m drawing into my savings account,’ and I was twenty years older than her thinking, ‘shit, should I have a savings account?’ Never crossed my mind. As a photographer in this city, every cent I made, I put back into making shit or buying cameras. I don’t know, you just have to believe in yourself. Yeah, that’s what I would say, and also, growing up, there wasn’t social media. Particularly now, I think it can be debilitating. It’s fun, but you should shut it out at points, and you definitely shouldn’t judge yourself on it. I would say to myself to have more confidence. I was confident, but the opportunities afforded to me were very different from that of my competitors who were all dudes.
Because of the things that I wasn’t getting - fashion magazine jobs, things like that - I did these documentary projects where the inspiration was from the heart and my curious mind, and taking whatever was available to me, and that was good. A door that might not be open to everyone but is to you for some reason, you should always go through that door. I’m really jumbling this shit. Redo. Okay. Any door that’s slightly cracked open, kick it in, and be confident in your vision because success is not about what happens right now. It could take twenty years. The direction that you take- though it might not be revealed to you for many years - could be exactly what you needed to do.