Carl Dunn has been capturing rock stars on stage for most of his life, and his images are a world onto its own, each one allowing aficionados and the uninitiated alike to pore over every little detail for hours on end. However, unlike many of other veteran photographers, Dunn doesn’t have a lot of books published under his name – Books Reviews a fascinating exclusion – let alone a book dedicated to a particular artist. Such an injustice is to be remedied this month with the arrival of “They Ask No Quarter”: the LED ZEPPELIN-centered tome of 12,000 words and, of course, more than 175 photos from 1969-1975 – shot in Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois and most of them never seen previously – laid out across 288 large-size pages.
They Ask No Quarter
There will be three versions of the book: regular one, The Limited Edition – featuring a 30×40 cm photo print of Jimmy Page – and The Ultimate Experience – featuring the possibility to order any image in the book in a 60×40 cm print signed by Carl.
Says Dunn, “Howard Mylett had my entire ZEPPELIN archive for nearly 20 years, during which time he published many books and pamphlets for which I never received one cent. Had it not been for Dave Brolan and especially Ross Halfin, I would have never recovered any of my original material. In the end, I recovered about half of the black-and-white negatives and maybe one third of the color slides. The images in the book came from the recovered material. When I look back on everything, I’m grateful to learn part of the story of Howard, but I also have to admit that his involvement and deception worked against him in the end, but in a roundabout way helped me more than it did him. The original material, although raising his profile among the fans who idolized ZEPPELIN then and even more now, get to have a more comprehensive look at the person’s work who provided the well which Howard drew from, bartered with and would ultimately sell parts of, in his own ZEPPELIN odyssey. For that, I can not deny that I will probably gain the most benefit.”
