Dogs


Posted on Jan 10, 2008
By Martha Garvey

by Catherine Johnson

Phaidon, 512 pages, $14.95

Available on Amazon.com

Thanks to Catherine Johnson's overwhelming love of dogs, photography, and most especially vintage photos featuring dogs, we dog photo fiends have an eccentric new gem of a book to peruse. It's the photographic equivalent of a big jar of salty peanuts. I defy you to look at just one.

Johnson is Chair of the Photography Committee of the National Arts Club in New York, and once assisted genius fashion photographer Norman Parkinson. (To add to the book's photographic street cred, artist William Wegman contributes an essay about the challenges of dog photography.) Johnson's been using her keen eye to collect old photos of dogs and their people for many years, focusing on photos from the beginning of the 20th century, concluding with the 1960s, long before Dogster and MySpace. This 450-photo collection, culled from Johnson's personal stash, runs the gamut from tiny dogs to big bruisers, and from the sweetly supercute to the utterly poignant. Some photos are professional quality, but most are garden-variety snapshots-if your garden included, say, three Dalmatians, or a Staffordshire terrier snuggling next to a pet raccoon.

There are little dogs in Christmas stockings, and big dogs in fancy dress (Paris Hilton and Sharon Osbourne have NOTHING on the owners of these long-gone dogs). There are dogs ready for the battlefield, and dogs blowing out birthday candles. The photos bear witness to the fact that putting your pooch in your Christmas card is a trend as old as Teddy Roosevelt. Brief quotes from dog-besotted authors lead us gracefully from one section into the other. And the writing matters: perhaps the most poignant picture in the whole book is that of a little terrier that died far too young; her owner has scrawled a brief, wrenching obituary in the thin white border around the photo.

The book's sepia tones and spidery typeface make you feel as though you've stumbled on an old photo album from an oddball genius aunt. Most of the pictures cry out for a second and third viewing, so rich are their stories, and leave you wanting to know more. Is that circus trainer still working with six poodles? Did that dog really ride a horse with his owner? That little boy hugging his dog so tightly the dog nearly spills from his arms-could he still be alive? If he is, you hope he finds this wonderful book. 

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