Peripatetic Renaissance man makes Chattanooga his perch
Heads up, Chattanooga arts community, because a new wind is blowing into town. Actually, make that: “Wynn”. Musician, photographer, and writer Dony Wynn is making this city his home—when he’s home. Which isn’t often, and not likely to be in the near future.
The self-described “professional nomad” made contact with the Shaking Ray Levi Society’s Bob Stagner through Facebook when he was considering leaving Austin, which makes sense, as they are both drummers deluxe.
After visiting Chattanooga for the first time last year, Wynn decided the “sweet little town” would become his base, when he isn’t scoping out the countryside in his 21st-century “tech-ed out to the max” travel trailer. And that decision is definitely Chattanooga’s gain.
Born in Memphis and raised in South Louisiana, Wynn began playing drums at age three and turned pro at age 13 (with a fake mustache). He spent decades playing with people such as Dr. John, Patti LaBelle and Robert Plant. He was nominated by the Academy of Country Music for Drummer of the Year in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999, and collaborated for 25 years with Robert Palmer.
The Austin Chronicle wrote this in 2013: “[He] was laying down tracks in the Bahamas on Palmer’s groundbreaking 1980 synth-pop LP Clues when the band in the studio next door enlisted him for a percussion army. That was Brian Eno and Talking Heads making Remain in Light.”
It was while he was with Palmer that he began experimenting with taking photos, which quickly became an obsession. After Palmer’s untimely death in 2003, he worked with country music duo Brooks & Dunn.
But a life change was calling, he says. He “went into exile and took a vow of poverty,” one he kept for seven years.
Yet all during that time he continued to take pictures, even when he could barely afford another roll of film at Walmart. His fascination was (and is) with toxic, industrial, and abandoned sites and the strange beauty that can be found there.
“What people avoid is what I am attracted to,” he says. Self-taught, it took years before he created the technique he uses to make his pictures, which are collected by year in the series called “Ephemerata”.
“They document a specific moment in the Earth’s history,” Wynn’s site explains, and he goes further, calling that moment “the end of the Industrial Age.” Each photo original is an extreme close-up, “the size of a quarter”, resulting in images that evoke one-cell life forms, or deserts, or supernovas, or whatever the viewer sees in them.
“I don’t crop them,” Wynn says, noting that in this he follows the techniques of seminal French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The images are then transferred to a 4- by 6-foot piece of Dibond aluminum as a one-of-a-kind art object. Two more images are made on high-quality art paper. Once those are sold, Wynn does not make more.
Despite spending so much time on his photography, occasionally, as he says, “risking life and limb to get the shots,” he has not abandoned music. Director Robert Rodriguez reached out to him years ago for help producing a song for his film Once Upon a Time in Mexico and maintains contact. He recently completely sessions work on two albums in Austin.
Here in Chattanooga, he fully expects to collaborate with the ever-innovating Shaking Rays. He also looks forward to mentoring young musicians. “If there’s a brand new songwriter who needs help, I can jump into that,” he says.
Meanwhile, he’s looking for a possible storefront space, and, as if that’s not enough, continuing to write, both blog posts and an incipient novel. (Take a look and a listen to one of his “Kinetic Tales” called “This Ain’t No BBQ” on YouTube.) And he continues, as he puts it, to “dwell in the quiet to make as much noise as he can.”
More information about Dony Wynn’s photographs, including pricing, is available at facebook.com/donywynnphotography