By Jeff Dunas
Published by Aperture, 1998 – Gift from the past Aperture’s director –
Location: Studio Sakse – Chiang Mai, Thailand
State of the Blues is photographer Jeff Dunas’s stirring tribute to the power of the blues, an American tradition that has its roots in the Mississippi Delta and branches that have spread around the world. One of the most vital early expressions of African-American culture, the blues makes poetry of sorrow and finds humour and bitter irony in the hardships of life. It tells of loves lost and regained, and of the fight for dignity in a world that judges people by the colour of their skin. Alongside a series of intimate portraits of the greatest blues performers of our time – including B.B. King, Koko Taylor, Charlie Musselwhite, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and many others – the book presents Dunas’s timeless photographs of the landmarks and byways of the Blues Highway, a heritage trail through the American South that leads from New Orleans to Chicago, where the blues continues to thrive today.
“State of the Blues began with the death of Muddy Waters and a single image I made of the legendary bluesman Hubert Sumlin shortly after. I realized that these seminal bluesmen were going to disappear and hoped to convince one of the magazines I worked for frequently to give me an assignment to document them and make portraits. Blues wasn’t really on their radar at that time (1993-4) though the House of Blues announced it would open its third venue in Los Angeles that year. I had a connection to them through Issac Hayes, whom I’d photographed in the 70s and was introduced to Nigel Shanley, then the chief evangelist for the club. I obtained permission to set up my ‘studio’ anytime I was interested in photographing an act that would appear – and thus begun the series.
The work began to take form in mid-1995 and by 1996 I had completed nearly 100 portraits and left to document the places where the blues was born – leading to a series of documentary images that told the story of why they had the blues. I also began interviewing many of my subjects, and the resulting book contains portraits, documentary images and a text woven from the interviews conducted.”
– Jeff Dunas
