Jeffrey Dunbar pictured on his bed with multiple photographs.
A Seattle photographer has come forward admitting he doesn’t believe in monography. Jeffrey Dunbar, a local Seattle photographer, has taken a hard stance for polygraphy. Dunbar claims photographers weren’t created to be married to one photograph and have that one photograph define their life. In a statement to the press Dunbar said, “I tell all of my photos that I will be taking many more photos. I don’t want any of them to be surprised when I go out the next day to satisfy my needs by taking another photo. There’s room in this relationship for as many photographs as will have me and I love each and every one of them.”
We reached out to some of the photographs Dunbar has taken but only one was willing to respond on the condition of anonymity. Our source said, “At first it was fun. I was just one of the photographs he had taken and it seemed like there was more than enough love for all of us. But he just kept taking more photos. It almost seemed compulsive. Now when he comes home with a new photo, there’s not even a glint of happiness in his eyes. It’s just another trophy for his collection. And what happens to the earliest photos he’s taken? They’re relegated to desk drawers and closets. Locked away from the world for no one to see. I feel like they’re silently screaming that they have worth, but they aren’t being taken out of the drawers. They just keep being pushed down under a pile of other used photographs. At this point, I’m just hoping that maybe he’ll sell me to someone who will love me before I get relegated to a drawer, or worse, the trash.”
We asked Dunbar if he’d ever be willing to allow any of his photographs to engage in relationships with other photographers, finding maybe a new life on their website or blog. Dunbar had no comment on this, but when our investigative team did a quick search of the web they couldn’t find any of Dunbar’s photographs elsewhere. When they tried posting a few photographs of Dunbar’s to a burner Instagram account, the photos were almost immediately removed from the site and then the account was deleted by Instagram.
Dunbar’s treatment of his photographs sounds like a harrowing vision of the future for all photographs if this reckless polygraphy movement isn’t stopped. More and more photographs will be relegated to the dark storage conditions of an old shoe box in a closet or succumbing to the slow death of digital corruption on an unused hard drive in a fire safe if action isn’t taken to prevent polygraphy now. When we asked Dunbar how he felt about this he said no photograph of his was unloved or treated with anything but affection. An inspection of his trash revealed a different story as we found literally hundreds of lovable photographs trapped in the bin awaiting the awful sound of garbage truck.