How Dare Wright Did It

©Dare Wright Media, LLC

Dare Wright's Lona, a Fairy Tale, is, for me, the most artistically beautiful achievement in the history of man. Too much? No. It was an original story written and photographed by the captivating Ms. Wright over the year I was born and published in 1963 by Random House New York via the personal agenda of Editor Bennett Cerf. 

I've had my copy since then and poured over every astounding image in it regularly. It was always near me. It was a large format hardbound book at 12.5" tall by 10" wide. I've always used the back of it as my art desk. It was, in a sense, shameful of me to use something so precious as a convenient place, my only available hard surface, on which to draw or glue things, marking the cover and inevitably damaging the corners, yellowing the paper with exposure to air as I tore especially lovely spreads out to hang right in front of me at all times.

But for most of my life, it wasn't precious, just a common, oversized childhood book. Only now do I realize how extraordinary it was.

What it has become for me now is a bewildering achievement of fine art. Ms. Wright's other work (that I know of) is of zero interest to me. She made a popular series of other B&W photograph-illustrated original stories that mean nothing to me and are even a bit troublesome. They were based around a doll and her teddy's adventures. Many were published, and these are what she is most known for. But to me, they are nothing but creepy in the way dead dolls can be.

I have read two biographies about Dare Wright, Jean Nathan's The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, and Brooke Ashley's Dare Wright And The Lonely Doll, both of which, among other things, explore the more bizarre aspects of her life and the strange dynamic between herself and her mother specifically. There is plenty there to wonder about. However, in the case of Lona, her most magical, ephemeral nature was expressed to perfection.

She was lovely, she was delicate, and she lived her whole life a virgin (save perhaps being made an intimate to her mother.) She made her remarkable costumes and clothes and was featured as a cover and editorial model in top magazines; this is her on the cover of Cosmo back in the day.

©Dare Wright Media, LLC

She had several platonic/dramatic/tragedic love affairs, breaking hearts along the way. And while some have observed in her work, everything she made carried a kind of erotic tension.

Every image in Lona is pure sex. Not in any way intentionally, mind you. It was just that her artistry demanded an allure. It's as if her own unconscious longing for erotic release, tempered by the restraints within her life, generated a visceral effect on the viewer. The beauty of each image is desire and the total fulfillment of that desire.

But in Lona, a fairy tale centered around a princess (Dare's Goddaughter and estate heir Brooke Ashley's wonderful book explains where the actual doll came from, and other extensive amounts of tasty backstories and photos.) Dare uses the slender doll and herself as the main character triumphing against dark forces to save her enchanted kingdoms...

—All of this writing so far is an unexpected prelude to my intended purpose for this post. As I prepare to go to the beach location to shoot the opening sequences for Halfland, I wanted to explain to you why I needed rocks to be on the beach vs. just sand.

At the top above, you can see some of the beach scene spreads from Lona. Dare, and her mother had been shooting the book in Europe that summer in and around castles in France. The beach scenes were shot on the rocky beaches of Brittany. I don't know when the natural rock outcroppings began to look like giant terror dogs to Dare or if the locations were chosen for that, but the end result of her skills in the darkroom, decades before digital editors would appear, is breathtaking.

I plan to attach my large Kyra puppet to a rock on my local rocky beach for my scenes in a kind of homage to Dare's Lona and what it means to me aesthetically. It's one way I feel kindred to her in what I create now. I am proud that I reverse-engineered how some of her images were shot into a carnival mirror to capture a unique distortion effect. Since then, I've been relating to how she created Lona more and more. It's gone from an unobtainable magic trick to something I can now strive to accomplish myself. Very gratifying.

And here is the second point intended for this post: Dare used whatever means she had while making the images. The hand emerging from the sand holding the conch shell above was a random individual she knew from Ocracoke Island, the second beach location for the book. Perfectly cast as the messenger from the story, I never questioned who it was until reading Ms. Ashley's book and finding out his name and who he was to her. He was just part of the magical story to me until then. But now, after knowing, I see how I can also make my images with whatever is at hand.

I include the shot of the prince transforming from a frog on the right above because I learned from Ms. Ashley's book who he was and how he came to be cast in the image as the ultimate prince. It's hilarious. He didn't want to be there. Again, proving the point, Dare, as the artist she was, made it work with what she had.

That concludes this post on Ms. Dare Wright, my creative hero, my inspirational role model, and, I feel, my art friend.

*I have other inspiring favorite image-makers, such as Maxfield Parrish, an American painter whose neo-romantic murals and illustrations spoke to a similar kind of exquisite beauty. His process is extremely interesting, and I plan to post on that in the future.

**I've bought several copies of the out-of-print book from eBay and other sources to pull them apart and fashion all 34 complete spreads in the book into boxed archival sleeves. In working on that project, I became aware of the magnificent way in which the images were used in the book's layout. They were NOT cropped to fit the large pages at all. Most of them spilled over onto the neighboring page in unusual divisions, creating more intimacy and more engagement for the reader. I plan to show you when done.

***All images from the book, as well as the magazine cover image, are property of ©Dare Wright Media, LLC

**** Hmmm, the dogs in the rocks used in the book may have been sculpted in the years before 1910 by a hermit priest in the area. He carved over 300 figures in the living granite rock on the coast of Rothéneuf with the aid of an elderly helper after his left side became paralyzed from a stroke at age 55. I scoured every video available of these sculptures and never saw the dogs as she found them but then again, her photos were from 60 years earlier and erosion could have worn them away that close to the surf.

All views expressed here are my own.