Photography is, before anything else, a negotiation with darkness, and this picture pushes the negotiation almost to its breaking point. Two Weimaraners sit at the edge of visibility, each mounted on the pale face of a tall box that rises from a near-black room; the left dog waits in shadow, patient and grey, while the right one surfaces brighter, its long muzzle and hanging ears lit to the point of apparition. The blacks are not empty. They are where most of the image is hiding.
What we are looking at is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty is the subject. Are these living dogs posed on plinths, or images of dogs printed onto standing panels, photographs of photographs? Wegman lets the question hang. The right-hand animal has the chalky, over-lit look of a picture lifted from another picture, while the left one sinks convincingly into three dimensions. Between them the eye travels back and forth, unable to settle which is the body and which the reproduction, which the room and which its tone.
Wegman has been at this since the 1970s, using his dogs to think about representation itself, and here the deadpan gives way to something genuinely eerie, closer to a séance than a comedy. The work was made on the large-format Polaroid, whose deep dye-blacks make that swallowing darkness possible, and it exists as a single mounted object, one physical print that cannot be struck again. The medium’s uniqueness rhymes with the picture’s theme: an image about copies that is itself utterly, stubbornly original.
Photography is, before anything else, a negotiation with darkness, and this picture pushes the negotiation almost to its breaking point. Two Weimaraners sit at the edge of visibility, each mounted on the pale face of a tall box that rises from a near-black room; the left dog waits in shadow, patient and grey, while the right one surfaces brighter, its long muzzle and hanging ears lit to the point of apparition. The blacks are not empty. They are where most of the image is hiding.
What we are looking at is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty is the subject. Are these living dogs posed on plinths, or images of dogs printed onto standing panels, photographs of photographs? Wegman lets the question hang. The right-hand animal has the chalky, over-lit look of a picture lifted from another picture, while the left one sinks convincingly into three dimensions. Between them the eye travels back and forth, unable to settle which is the body and which the reproduction, which the room and which its tone.
Wegman has been at this since the 1970s, using his dogs to think about representation itself, and here the deadpan gives way to something genuinely eerie, closer to a séance than a comedy. The work was made on the large-format Polaroid, whose deep dye-blacks make that swallowing darkness possible, and it exists as a single mounted object, one physical print that cannot be struck again. The medium’s uniqueness rhymes with the picture’s theme: an image about copies that is itself utterly, stubbornly original.