Mirrors and Smoke: How I Became a Photographer

In 2011, prize-winning fiction writer Robert Dunn read a review of a new Fuji single-lens-reflex camera, and something clicked. Later that day, although the then-new Fuji X100 was as hard to get as the latest iPhone, he’d tracked one down. The next day he went out shooting photos for the first time since a brief dalliance with a cheap Nikon decades earlier.Little did Dunn know his life had changed. He’d always loved photography, and now he took his new camera with him everywhere he went. Photographs accumulated, and he began to put them into books. Soon he was making photobooks in a spirit similar to the novels he’d written, and those photobooks are now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the New York Public Library.In Mirrors and Smoke, Dunn tells the full story of his discovery of photography, and the way it changed his life. It’s a memoir of finding a new passion later in life. It’s about the bountiful world of photobooks. Most of all, it’s about the way Dunn has learned to see the essence of the world around him in ever greater and more meaningful detail, then take that empathic vision and turn it into art. As he writes: “I found out that being a photographer was vastly more interesting than not being one. That walking about trying to see, and feel, as much as possible, then render all that into images was a much richer life than not doing it.”Mirrors and Smoke is a book for everyone who has already traced the magical path of becoming a photographer, as well as the simply photography-curious. Read it, then pick up your camera and go hit the streets. There’s a bounty of beauty and revelation waiting for you out there. Read more