The microphone is the giveaway. Not the wig, though the wig is doing heroic work — a curtain of golden hair parted dead-centre, falling past the shoulders of a gown the colour of weak tea — and not the feather boa fraying at the wrists like something that has seen a few late nights. No, it's the microphone: a real vintage chrome ribbon mic on its stand, the kind that promises a torch song, and the way the dog's paw rests on it, loosely, proprietorially, as if she's done this a thousand times and is just waiting for the band to settle.
Because of course it's a dog. A Weimaraner, that grey patrician muzzle and those amber eyes Wegman has been photographing since the seventies, here gazing out over the footlights with the unbothered poise of a performer who knows the room is hers. I keep wanting to laugh and keep not quite managing it. The joke is obvious — dressed-up dog, cabaret — and it should wear thin in a second. It doesn't. What stops it is the stillness. A real entertainer would be mid-gesture; this one simply is, draped and waiting, and the waiting is where the picture gets you.
That it's a unique 20-by-20 Polaroid, made on the room-sized 20x24 camera Wegman commandeered for these costumed portraits, matters more than it first seems. There's no negative, no second chance, no edition — just this one survivor of one held breath, the print itself the original event. Stand with it long enough and the costume stops being the point. You're left with a creature looking back at you, patient, faintly dignified, on the edge of a song it will never sing. The funniest pictures, it turns out, are the ones that quietly refuse to let you off the hook.
The microphone is the giveaway. Not the wig, though the wig is doing heroic work — a curtain of golden hair parted dead-centre, falling past the shoulders of a gown the colour of weak tea — and not the feather boa fraying at the wrists like something that has seen a few late nights. No, it's the microphone: a real vintage chrome ribbon mic on its stand, the kind that promises a torch song, and the way the dog's paw rests on it, loosely, proprietorially, as if she's done this a thousand times and is just waiting for the band to settle.
Because of course it's a dog. A Weimaraner, that grey patrician muzzle and those amber eyes Wegman has been photographing since the seventies, here gazing out over the footlights with the unbothered poise of a performer who knows the room is hers. I keep wanting to laugh and keep not quite managing it. The joke is obvious — dressed-up dog, cabaret — and it should wear thin in a second. It doesn't. What stops it is the stillness. A real entertainer would be mid-gesture; this one simply is, draped and waiting, and the waiting is where the picture gets you.
That it's a unique 20-by-20 Polaroid, made on the room-sized 20x24 camera Wegman commandeered for these costumed portraits, matters more than it first seems. There's no negative, no second chance, no edition — just this one survivor of one held breath, the print itself the original event. Stand with it long enough and the costume stops being the point. You're left with a creature looking back at you, patient, faintly dignified, on the edge of a song it will never sing. The funniest pictures, it turns out, are the ones that quietly refuse to let you off the hook.