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CHERYL DUNN | NYC Public Visual Streetscapes
Cheryl Dunn tells with images, what remains unheard, what the fast walking passer-by doesn’t notice; it can be the kid spray painting behind the corner of the block, or the homeless person always sitting on the same step for weeks or the skater, who conquers the urban concrete with his board. The New York City photographer and filmmaker has been documenting the Big Apple’s street life since the early ’90s with her Leica or by shooting shorts and feature-length films. Her works have been shown in Tate Modern, Deitch Project and featured in the MOCA’s exhibition Art in the Streets. Now she’s working on Everybody Street, a documentary about the living masters of NYC street photography.
In your documentary you unveil for once the men and the women behind the camera, portrayed in their natural environment, New York. What’s the story behind this project?
A year and a half ago I did the short Everybody Street, it was a commission by the Seaport Museum in conjunction with an Alfred Stieglitz show, the first photographer to take the 4 x 5 camera off the tripod and take it to the streets; the first to acknowledge photography as an art form and not just a way of recording facts. I took this opportunity to reach out to photographers that I greatly admire and who really are the foundation of NYC street photography like Bruce Davidson and Joel Meyerowitz. I decided to expand the project into a feature length documentary. The film features artists that are alive from Jamel Shabazz, to Boogie and Martha Cooper, as I want them to talk about their own process, rather than somebody else doing it on their behalf. I’m not pretending to say “This is what the history of street photography is”. It’s more about how the public visual landscape of NYC is seen from the eyes of lots of artists I admire.
Art critic John Berger says that cinema, when it achieves art, is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind; and it’s popular and vagrant – like your main characters. Do you see your work and attitude mirrored in these words?
Well, cinema is a medium that’s so powerful because it has so many layers like motion, energy, storytelling, music. It allows you to go as close as you can get and portray real things. I hate celebrity culture with its idea that someone’s better than someone else, my work is contrary to that. I come from a no advantage background, beyond NYC I’ve also lived in Milan and Barcelona, and in all of those cities it seems like it’s all about your connections, who you know. There’s nothing fair about life, so that’s why I’m into groups of people that teach me more about the real world. They really struggle to have a voice and if I can, I want to help in my own little way – take some pictures and get their words out there. I can learn a lot from that homeless person that sits on the streets, all day long, maybe he’s an alcoholic, I don’t care; I’m sure that with all his observation of our daily comings and goings, he’s got something to teach me. Beyond that, I have done other documentary bodies of work about boxers, artists, graffiti writers. In the early ’90s I was shooting a lot for culture, music and fashion magazines. I always tried to pitch documentary stories about these other subjects. Now it’s totally normal, but at that time it wasn’t, they were just featuring prefabricated stars and pop idols. I would pitch stories on Barry McGee, Mark Gonzales etc. Uncommon question at that time, but now things have changed.
Then they became well-known. What was subcultural once is often attempted to be commodified….what do you think about that?
If you want to create something new, now, there will always be more and more people wanting to do it. There will be the risk of commodification, but that´s not the real problem, as from outside everything looks so simple, but people tend not to realize how much work things take. If you want to reach your goals you have to be very committed to do your thing every single day, it’s not easy and those people that are not motivated by the right reasons, will fall away. The artists that have to do what they do because they just have to, are the ones that will not stop and will eventually rise above.
You started photographing for cultural magazines, how does this bond with journalism affect your way of taking pictures and making films?
Well, I’ve learnt from experience to consider the relationship the subject creates with you while shooting. How open a person can be one on one and how he radically changes with a larger crew. I come from a kind of photography where I used to go around alone, and this has allowed me to get closer in my pictures. Film-making is different. There’s lot of people involved, but I still keep on trying to recreate that single experience of intimacy with the subject and to make the crew invisible.
TheOccupy Wall Street crowd is one of your latest projects, can you talk a bit about it?
My studio is a block away from Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, so I had the chance to see what was happening before it turned into a global movement. It all started from the 10th anniversary of 9/11′s demonstrations: for days I’ve been photographing people and going into the area to protest against a possible government involvement and hypothetical conspiracy. Lots of them then moved from City Hall to Zuccotti Park. When everything started they were super grassroots, regular people who wanted to be heard, that’s what I liked, people who were making signs with cardboard and pencils to have a voice. The mainstream press didn’t go there for nearly 3 weeks, but when the media jumped on the whole thing, it all turned into something totally different. What you see in the press can be really different from how it is, people have to remember that this is not necessarily reality. There are always two experiences for any situation, there’s the first hand experience and there is the one that is filtered by the media.
Which are the projects you are focusing on now?
What I’m doing now, both in film and in photography, is reflecting how people deal with a camera and how people react when I take pictures with a Leica, which is considered really antique now that everybody takes pictures and shoots videos from their phones. I’ve shot a lot of music festivals and I had experiences where I was in a sea of a hundred thousand people and there was always someone who looked at me and said “Oh my God, she’s got a real camera!”. Now I’m taking pictures of people taking pictures and reflecting on how they’re dealing with image-making, that’s what’s most interesting to me, cause I have lots of questions about that. It’s what I’ve studied in the past year and I’m curious about what will happen in the future.
New York attracts people from all over the world, it’s familiar and elusive at the same time, with the city being in perpetual motion and change. There could be thousands and thousands of New Yorks, one for each of its inhabitants. What’s your New York, which is the one you’ve showed in your exhibition Uncanny at Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan?
New York is a really unique place in the world. It’s more of a world city as opposed to an American city. You can find every kind of person here. It’s still a place for dreams and promises, even if sometimes the town beats you down. My family is one of those who came with a dream in their luggage: my grandmother came to Ellis Island on a boat from Italy when she was 14, I’m third generation. How many generations have to pass before saying “I’m American?”. NYC is a great mixture of all these identities in transit, people looking for something, trying to do or say something, to make change. From today’s demonstrators, to kids writing stuff on the wall, such as Dash Snow, who crawled out on the middle of Brooklyn bridge where he wrote ”fuck Giuliani” (the then mayor of Nyc). He was one of the many that go to the streets and try to have a voice, people that have the drive to do something to make a better life, to be heard, that’s what my pictures are about.
All Pictures: Cheryl Dunn/www.cheryldunn.net/
Text> Serena Valietti
