A costume is an argument about who someone is. Here the argument is made by a jacket sewn from mismatched rectangles—rust, slate blue, a band of orange, a panel of deep red—each block butting against the next like a sample book that decided to become clothing. The garment is the most articulate thing in the frame, and it has been buttoned onto a Weimaraner.
The dog does not perform. That is the whole device. Those pale amber eyes, set in the grey velvet of a face the camera renders with almost forensic patience, look slightly past us with the mild gravity of a sitter who has done this before and is content to wait. The 20-by-24 Polaroid does what only that enormous instant camera could: it holds the wet shine of the eye and the soft fall of the ears at one-to-one, no negative, no enlargement, a single object made once. The deckled white margin at the top, the small dark scatter of marks along its edge, are the apparatus admitting itself—this is a thing developed in front of the photographer, not printed from anything.
What interests me is the seam between the species and the suit. The jacket's sleeve crosses the chest at an angle, ending where a paw should be and isn't, so the body reads as folded, patient, oddly courtly. The colour-field tailoring belongs to fashion; the head belongs to the kennel; the seriousness belongs to portraiture. None of these cancel out. This is the register Wegman opened with the large-format Polaroid through the 1980s and 90s, his Weimaraners—descendants of Man Ray and Fay Ray—neither pets nor puppets but collaborators in a deadpan about how readily we dress an animal in our own meanings. Signed and dated lower right, 1994, it is a unique print: there is no second one anywhere.
A costume is an argument about who someone is. Here the argument is made by a jacket sewn from mismatched rectangles—rust, slate blue, a band of orange, a panel of deep red—each block butting against the next like a sample book that decided to become clothing. The garment is the most articulate thing in the frame, and it has been buttoned onto a Weimaraner.
The dog does not perform. That is the whole device. Those pale amber eyes, set in the grey velvet of a face the camera renders with almost forensic patience, look slightly past us with the mild gravity of a sitter who has done this before and is content to wait. The 20-by-24 Polaroid does what only that enormous instant camera could: it holds the wet shine of the eye and the soft fall of the ears at one-to-one, no negative, no enlargement, a single object made once. The deckled white margin at the top, the small dark scatter of marks along its edge, are the apparatus admitting itself—this is a thing developed in front of the photographer, not printed from anything.
What interests me is the seam between the species and the suit. The jacket's sleeve crosses the chest at an angle, ending where a paw should be and isn't, so the body reads as folded, patient, oddly courtly. The colour-field tailoring belongs to fashion; the head belongs to the kennel; the seriousness belongs to portraiture. None of these cancel out. This is the register Wegman opened with the large-format Polaroid through the 1980s and 90s, his Weimaraners—descendants of Man Ray and Fay Ray—neither pets nor puppets but collaborators in a deadpan about how readily we dress an animal in our own meanings. Signed and dated lower right, 1994, it is a unique print: there is no second one anywhere.