Give a dog a profile and you get a portrait — that is more or less the joke and the tenderness of Wegman’s whole enterprise, and Browne Bobbin plays it dead straight. The Weimaraner is turned in strict profile, the way Renaissance dukes were painted so that posterity would take them seriously, gazing off toward something on the right the rest of us will never be told about.
What undoes you is how completely the dog is granted the dignity of the pose. Wegman sets that grey-brown coat against a ground of almost exactly the same grey-brown, so that animal and air nearly dissolve into one another and only the amber eye, the wet nose and the long suede fold of the ear insist on where the dog stops and the studio begins. It is a color photograph organized almost entirely within a single color, which ought not to work and entirely does.
Wegman spent decades proving his Weimaraners could hold any role — costumed, upright, absurd — but here he asks the dog to do the hardest thing, which is simply to sit for its own likeness. No outfit, no gag, just breed and bearing and the faint melancholy every long-eared dog seems born wearing. The pigment print renders the nap of the fur so precisely that you brace, absurdly, to be sniffed.
Give a dog a profile and you get a portrait — that is more or less the joke and the tenderness of Wegman’s whole enterprise, and Browne Bobbin plays it dead straight. The Weimaraner is turned in strict profile, the way Renaissance dukes were painted so that posterity would take them seriously, gazing off toward something on the right the rest of us will never be told about.
What undoes you is how completely the dog is granted the dignity of the pose. Wegman sets that grey-brown coat against a ground of almost exactly the same grey-brown, so that animal and air nearly dissolve into one another and only the amber eye, the wet nose and the long suede fold of the ear insist on where the dog stops and the studio begins. It is a color photograph organized almost entirely within a single color, which ought not to work and entirely does.
Wegman spent decades proving his Weimaraners could hold any role — costumed, upright, absurd — but here he asks the dog to do the hardest thing, which is simply to sit for its own likeness. No outfit, no gag, just breed and bearing and the faint melancholy every long-eared dog seems born wearing. The pigment print renders the nap of the fur so precisely that you brace, absurdly, to be sniffed.