Issue 15
Cheryl Dunn
By Sarah TomlinsonPhotos By Cheryl Dunn
After two decades of photographing street artists and urban life, Cheryl Dunn finds creative reinvigoration from an unexpected source
Manhattan-based photographer and documentary filmmaker Cheryl Dunn exalts in the kind of gritty street scenes that make tourists pull their children close and cross the street. Not because she has any desire to glorify violence or suffering, but because she sees a truth in these moments. She was recently in Hollywood, where she mounted an art show and screening to benefit her in-progress documentary about the Creative Growth Art Center, an Oakland, California based non-profit that nurtures the creativity of disabled adult artists. The nights before the opening, she saw a man receiving a lap dance in a white Hummer limo as his friends cheered on. She saw another man pawing through the gutter for a phantom rock—right in the shadow of actress Eva Longoria’s chic new restaurant, Beso.
Dunn has an angular elegance and her speech is vibrant and profanity-peppered. She talks tough, because she spent most of her career hanging with the guys: her peers in the male-dominated art world—many who have invited her to photograph their lives—and the streetwise boxers, graffiti writers and homeless men she has documented. She developed a deep love for New York City during her childhood in Teaneck, New Jersey. She documents the city streets, and the people who strive to leave their mark there, despite having none of the riches and connections upon which the metropolis is built.
In an interview conducted at the Los Angeles offices of her production company, HKM, Dunn says, “I think I’m drawn to really intrinsic, basic humanness. And that’s one thing that’s a huge thread in the Creative Growth thing, and I think 9/11. Everything else went out the window when that shit went down. It’s like, who cares if the Museum of Modern Art has your painting? This could be the end of the world.”
For almost 20 years, Dunn has worked out of a studio one block from the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of 9/11, she took her camera into the street, where she was struck by this rare opportunity to capture pure emotion—people shed the pretenses of their day-to-day lives in the wake of this upending tragedy. These portraits were gathered together on Dunn’s website in a series titled “A Sad Day.”
Dunn has photographed widely varied cultural pockets of American life, as exemplified by her new photo book, Some Kinda Vocation (PictureBox, Inc.) The book looks back at the images she has captured over the past two decades—Dunn has documented the career arcs of close friends like Barry “Twist” McGee, his late wife Margaret “Meta” Kilgallen and Chris Johansen. Like Dunn, these artists ennobled the realities of urban life through their own work.
The book is accompanied by a DVD which features Creative Life Store, a film that documents the experiences of 13 artists—including the aforementioned McGee, Kilgallen and Johansen—who were invited to Tokyo to launch simultaneous exhibitions in January, 2001. The artists grapple with finding artistic meaning at a time when the contemporary art scene has gone mad for hype, profit and pop culture cachet. Dunn says, of the film, “I just wanted it to be like a painting. When you go to a museum, you don’t look at who made the work, and you don’t look at who owns it. It’s just there, and you feel it, and you take it in.”
As a photographer, Dunn has been able to penetrate arenas where women are not accepted as equals. She is acutely aware of the role her personality and appearance played in her ability to create her art. (In Creative Life Store, Kilgallen comments on her frustration at being one of the few women in the street art scene.) Dunn says, “I was like some kind of tomboy girl with a camera. I was not the sexy girl, they couldn’t put me in a box. I became much more of a fly on the wall. But I was knowledgeable about their sport, so I got a lot of these guys to really open up to me, because they couldn’t be vulnerable in front of their peers.”
Dunn says she is inspired by people who were born without privilege, but have the audacity to seek notoriety and success. People who try to “somehow figure out how to have a voice, whether it’s doing graffiti, or protesting, or whatever… Maybe they’re making it, and maybe they’re not. But they’re not buying into their place, and they’re trying to have a voice. That type of character and that type of energy is interesting to me,” she says. “I’ve read Us magazine, but celebrity and celebrity culture, I just can’t stand. Nobody is better than anybody else… Maybe that’s why I was never a very successful commercial photographer.”
In 2006, Dunn was an artist-in-resident at the Creative Growth Center. At her recent Los Angeles show, Dunn showed photographs taken there, documenting the center’s clients and their artwork. Dunn also screened a trailer of the documentary, depicting the artists of the Creative Growth Center—the film she was raising funds to complete. Of this project, Dunn says, “It brought me back to why I documented artists to begin with. When art and art making… was just about the need to do it, and not infiltrated by the business of art… having the privilege to be around this school and these artists, made me have a whole reawakening. [It brought me back] to how I felt about what I was doing, 10 years ago.”