Two hands hold open the jaws of a Rottweiler. The fingers are long, the nails filed to points and lacquered a deep red; on one hand a rectangular diamond the size of a stamp, on the other a solitaire, and a bracelet at the wrist. The dog's muzzle fills the centre of the frame — tan and black fur, the upper lip pushed back off the teeth, the canines white and very clean, the palate and tongue in shadow. The head is upside down relative to ours.
The studium announces itself immediately: this is jewellery, photographed with an aggression the trade has used since the eighties, and the message is legible before one has finished looking — hardness, appetite, expense. Diamond and tooth are the same substance in the picture's argument, both hard, both white, both the product of pressure.
What wounds me is elsewhere. Along the lower jaw, at the edge of the frame, the fur is wet — matted into small dark points by saliva that has run and is still running. Nobody styled that. It is the one thing in the photograph that is happening rather than being displayed, and it tells me that the animal is alive, warm, panting, held. The rings are an argument. The wet fur is a fact, and it is the fact I cannot put down.
Two hands hold open the jaws of a Rottweiler. The fingers are long, the nails filed to points and lacquered a deep red; on one hand a rectangular diamond the size of a stamp, on the other a solitaire, and a bracelet at the wrist. The dog's muzzle fills the centre of the frame — tan and black fur, the upper lip pushed back off the teeth, the canines white and very clean, the palate and tongue in shadow. The head is upside down relative to ours.
The studium announces itself immediately: this is jewellery, photographed with an aggression the trade has used since the eighties, and the message is legible before one has finished looking — hardness, appetite, expense. Diamond and tooth are the same substance in the picture's argument, both hard, both white, both the product of pressure.
What wounds me is elsewhere. Along the lower jaw, at the edge of the frame, the fur is wet — matted into small dark points by saliva that has run and is still running. Nobody styled that. It is the one thing in the photograph that is happening rather than being displayed, and it tells me that the animal is alive, warm, panting, held. The rings are an argument. The wet fur is a fact, and it is the fact I cannot put down.