Count the eyes. There are more than two: small glass spheres, seven or eight of them, clustered in bright arcs across the muzzle and brow where a single pair belongs. Once noticed, they reorganize the whole face, which is itself already strange, a Weimaraner rendered as a pale negative, silver fur glowing out of a flat black field, the long ears hanging translucent as wax. The dog sits square and patient, a formal bust, while these extra beads scatter light like nail heads driven into a saint.
What makes the picture hold is the discipline of its blacks. Wegman sets the animal against a ground so deep it reads as nothing at all, then lets the reversed tones do the modeling, so the chest and throat come forward in soft silver while the top of the skull dissolves back into the dark. It is lit, if that is the word, from within. The vantage is straight-on and unhurried, the framing centered and plain, the sort of frontal address a nineteenth-century studio reserved for men of consequence.
Wegman has photographed these dogs since the 1970s with a wit that keeps sliding, when you least expect it, toward the uncanny, and this is one of the slides. The work was made on the large-format black-and-white Polaroid, its tones reversed so the dog glows as a silver negative, a single sheet mounted as one object, no second copy anywhere. What the extra eyes finally do is refuse the easy sentiment of the animal portrait; they turn a familiar face into something watchful, multiple, and not quite ready to be understood.
Count the eyes. There are more than two: small glass spheres, seven or eight of them, clustered in bright arcs across the muzzle and brow where a single pair belongs. Once noticed, they reorganize the whole face, which is itself already strange, a Weimaraner rendered as a pale negative, silver fur glowing out of a flat black field, the long ears hanging translucent as wax. The dog sits square and patient, a formal bust, while these extra beads scatter light like nail heads driven into a saint.
What makes the picture hold is the discipline of its blacks. Wegman sets the animal against a ground so deep it reads as nothing at all, then lets the reversed tones do the modeling, so the chest and throat come forward in soft silver while the top of the skull dissolves back into the dark. It is lit, if that is the word, from within. The vantage is straight-on and unhurried, the framing centered and plain, the sort of frontal address a nineteenth-century studio reserved for men of consequence.
Wegman has photographed these dogs since the 1970s with a wit that keeps sliding, when you least expect it, toward the uncanny, and this is one of the slides. The work was made on the large-format black-and-white Polaroid, its tones reversed so the dog glows as a silver negative, a single sheet mounted as one object, no second copy anywhere. What the extra eyes finally do is refuse the easy sentiment of the animal portrait; they turn a familiar face into something watchful, multiple, and not quite ready to be understood.