Seconds earlier the floral cloth lay slack, a shapeless bolt with nothing to hold it upright; seconds later the dog will shrug it loose and the pose collapses into an ordinary animal in an empty studio. What we are shown is the interval between those states, held just long enough for the red and yellow blossoms to organize into a garment and the garment into a figure. The Weimaraner submits with a gravity no costume can quite make comic.
The seduction is real and worth distrusting. We are invited to read a personage into the drape — a dowager in her flowered shawl, a saint under a printed veil — and the invitation works because the animal refuses to perform it. That amber eye, the long grey muzzle emerging where a chin should be, hold still against the busy field of daisies and teal leaves. The picture flatters our appetite for resemblance while declining to satisfy it; the more we furnish the dog with sentiment, the more plainly it stays a dog wrapped in someone’s floral jacket.
Wegman has staged his Weimaraners in this deadpan register since the 1970s, and the conceit survives repetition because he never mistakes whimsy for tenderness. This image comes from his large-format Polaroid studio, which yields not multiples but one object: one exposure, one sheet, its black ground and warm margin fixed in a chemistry that cannot be run again. The costume is theatrical; the print is not. It is a unique thing, and that uniqueness is the last joke, a one-off portrait of a sitter who never agreed to sit.
Seconds earlier the floral cloth lay slack, a shapeless bolt with nothing to hold it upright; seconds later the dog will shrug it loose and the pose collapses into an ordinary animal in an empty studio. What we are shown is the interval between those states, held just long enough for the red and yellow blossoms to organize into a garment and the garment into a figure. The Weimaraner submits with a gravity no costume can quite make comic.
The seduction is real and worth distrusting. We are invited to read a personage into the drape — a dowager in her flowered shawl, a saint under a printed veil — and the invitation works because the animal refuses to perform it. That amber eye, the long grey muzzle emerging where a chin should be, hold still against the busy field of daisies and teal leaves. The picture flatters our appetite for resemblance while declining to satisfy it; the more we furnish the dog with sentiment, the more plainly it stays a dog wrapped in someone’s floral jacket.
Wegman has staged his Weimaraners in this deadpan register since the 1970s, and the conceit survives repetition because he never mistakes whimsy for tenderness. This image comes from his large-format Polaroid studio, which yields not multiples but one object: one exposure, one sheet, its black ground and warm margin fixed in a chemistry that cannot be run again. The costume is theatrical; the print is not. It is a unique thing, and that uniqueness is the last joke, a one-off portrait of a sitter who never agreed to sit.