The technology was new. The impulse was not

The Art of Dog is an ongoing series that digs into the deeper side of dog photography – its history, its meaning, its purpose. It’s for paid subscribers. If you haven’t used your one free unlock yet, this might be the time.

The first known image in the history of dog photography isn’t a dog.

It’s a gravestone.

Last fall, when Bella was diagnosed with a blood clot on her heart, I started staying closer to home. To while away the time, I started reading again.

I turned to my favorite subject these days: dog photography. There on the shelves of one of my local used bookstores sat a copy of Ann Janine Morey’s Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves.

As I flipped through the pages, I often furrowed my brow as Morey connected dog photography to racism, sexism, class and power and all the ways humans have used animals to say things about themselves.

She’s rigorous and a little ruthless, and she sent me straight down a rabbit hole I’m still in: the history of dog photography, what it means, how it tracks alongside the human experience, alongside the development of the camera itself. I started to see how the story of dogs in photographs is really the story of what dogs and humans have meant to each other – and how that meaning has shifted, deepened and occasionally been ignored entirely.

She made me want to understand better the relationship between dogs and humans. Not just why the dog was in the frame – Morey handles that – but how. How did this dog fit into this life? What did it mean, across time, to point a lens at the animal you loved? And maybe the question underneath all of it: Did the dog even want to be there?

That last one sounds simple. It isn’t. Consent in animal photography is something I think about a lot – in my own work and in the work I study.

The human has the credit card.

The human signs the service agreement.

The human drives to the session.

The human holds the leash.

The human selects the favorites and purchases the artwork.

The dogs cannot do all those things.

The dogs also cannot say no. They participate in the session and we don’t always know whether they’re willing or not – although we can sure see it in their eyes sometimes.

The question is stirred: How do we read presence, willingness, ease? How do we know when a dog is with us versus merely near us?

Then there’s that first known image of a dog.