Jim Dunne, father of the automotive spy photo, dies

There may have been a few surreptitious shots of future cars that appeared in a few newspapers before Jim Dunne came along, but it was Dunne who made a business out of it.

As such, Dunne virtually invented the art and small business of automotive spy photography, hiding out where he knew some future prototype wrapped in camouflage would be cruising past, then firing off as many frames of 35 mm Kodachrome as he could as fast as he could before the car was gone.

Sometimes he’d be discovered, and there were a few stories about Dunne outsmarting various security guards or lighting up the tires of his Chevy Caprice in bold escapes.

Dunne, who died Monday at home in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., at age 87, was one of the few people to make a bona fide living taking spy shots of cars, and his execution was often as precise as a military maneuver.

A little background on spy photography: Car manufacturers don’t want the public to know about future models before the marketing, advertising and production departments are ready to release them.

The reason for that is strictly profit. If potential buyers see that a new and better model is coming, they might wait for it instead of buying something from the brand’s current offerings. This would cost the car company millions of dollars or more. But at the same time, carmakers have to test and refine new cars on real roads in the real world. So, they take a risk, wrapping the new models in camo and hoping no one will see the new car.

Spy photographers like Dunne knew this and knew where carmakers went for hot-weather testing (Death Valley in the summer) and cold-weather testing (northern Minnesota and Canada).

Sometimes Dunne didn’t have to travel quite so far.

 “I know the Milford Proving Ground quite well,” he once said on a video posted by LeftLaneNews. “I’ve told drivers in the past, 'When you drive down the north-south straightaway, please smile because your picture will probably be taken.' ”

Dunne was known for sitting on a hill that overlooked a portion of GM’s Milford Proving Ground, outside Detroit, waiting for prototypes to drive by. GM security took to calling the spot “Dunne’s Grove.” He knew what to shoot and what to let go.

“You see (a car camouflaged in) black and white driving down the street, everybody’s looking at it. Is this supposed to hide the car or say, ‘Here I am. I’m new. Take my picture'?”

His most brazen move was to buy land that abutted what was then Chrysler’s proving grounds in the Arizona desert. It was quite a while before Chrysler realized what was going on and put up a big fence. By that time Dunne had more than paid for the cost of the land and even, legend has it, sold it for a tidy profit to Chrysler. (That was the legend; the truth was it went to a land developer, but Dunne still made a heck of a profit on it.)

It’s true there were “Wanted” posters of Dunne in several car company security offices. But he was treated more as a gentleman bandit than a serious danger. While he shot spy photos for over 50 years, Dunne also worked full time as an automotive journalist, first at Popular Science and then at Popular Mechanics.

Leo James Dunne was born in Detroit on Dec. 13, 1931, and served three years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War as a reconnaissance specialist, rising to the rank of E5. He graduated from the University of Detroit in 1958 with a degree in industrial engineering and promptly became a journalist.

He sold his spy photos to many media outlets, including Automotive News and Autoweek. I recall seeing Dunne stroll into the Autoweek offices every couple of weeks, a sleeve of slides in an envelope, a smile on his face. Then-editor Matt DeLorenzo would welcome him, they’d retreat into DeLo’s office and the shots were published in the next issue of Autoweek -- this was back when print was the only medium and Autoweek came out every week.

In 2011, Dunne published a book, Car Spy, featuring secret cars exposed by what he called the auto industry's most notorious photographer.

"Jim was terrific at sharing the secrets of his trade," said DeLorenzo. "He was brazen, with his motto that you have to look like you belong. That’s why he’d always wear a blue blazer, gray slacks and a tie. He’d walk into some places, maybe holding a clipboard and true to his amiable personality, begin chatting people up. The best spies are the ones who look like they’re part of the team rather than someone skulking about in the shadows. He'll be missed."

"Jim and I were serious competitors, yet we always remained good friends," said fellow spy photographer Brenda Priddy. "I last saw Jim in January. We had lunch at Ford’s Garage, and then he took me to the airport. I wanted to visit Jim last week, but he didn’t want friends to see him so ill. He still talked about taking a road trip to Arizona to visit me, and then on to California to spend time with his family, but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen. We attempted to talk on the phone, although there were lots of tears on both ends.

"I shouldn’t feel sad. Jim had a long life filled with success, happiness, love, many good friends, and until recently, good health. But even as we celebrate his life, my heart is breaking. And so are so many others."

Jim Dunne's son, Tim, worked at Autoweek for several years in the late '80s and early '90s. Many was the night we spent playing basketball on Jim Dunne's driveway court, occasionally smacking dents in the sculpted aluminum garage doors with our missed shots. Sorry about the dents, Jim. But he never complained. He was glad to have us around.

The advent of the Internet and the camera phone, and a half a million kids all thinking they were getting an exclusive, suddenly made everyone a spy photographer, and the great Jim Dunne retired from the business he had created, if not from readers’ memories.

Dunne brought us a lot of sneak peeks over the years -- of new Corvettes, Mustangs and many more mundane models, always with a slight smirk at the corner of his smile, as if he’d gotten away with something every time. He had, of course, and car enthusiasts were always the beneficiaries, even if the car manufacturers winced a little -- or a lot -- every time he did it.

Goodbye, Jim Dunne. Thanks for all the looks ahead.

Visitation will be held Thursday, Aug. 22 at Verheyden Funeral Home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., from 3-8 p.m. ET, with a rosary service at 7:30 p.m. A funeral mass will begin at 10 a.m. ET on Friday, Aug. 23 at St. Clare of Montefalco Church in Grosse Pointe, Mich.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story misstated Jim Dunne's date of birth and misspelled St. Clare of Montefalco Church.