Fotomuseum The Hague,
Being Human by William Wegman
Through 03-01-2021
American William Wegman (b. 1943) started photographing his Weimaraner dog in the 1970s, knowing that this breed enjoyed the act of posing and dressing up. After posing in front of Wegman’s camera, Man Ray, (named after the artist), the conceptual photographer decided to make his devoted hound the subject of his studio work. Here we see not only Man Ray but his descendants, Fay Wray, Candy and other Weimaraners, all patiently sitting or standing in perfectly aligned poses. Moving from the succulent, dense indigos and vermilions of his giant polaroids to the intense colour digital prints, there is an easy transition from the verisimilitude of the analogue to the immediacy of the digital. The melancholy eyes, the unsmiling forbearance of the perfectly groomed hound, lends a sombre, reflective quality to these animal portraits. Drawing on the curious and almost unbelievable tendencies of Surrealism, we see a huge print of a hound standing on three cubes, his or her paws poised on the black, grey and white edifices, (Contact 2014). Accessible, reassuring, playful and surprising, these images are reliant on the innovation of new, unexpected poses. But Wegman’s inventiveness is unbounded. It is not only the spectacular at play, here, however. The moments when his photos were most touching were when the dog's paws could be seen peeping through a dress as he or she sat on a chair, perhaps with a skirt or dress hanging below. Many of these images could illustrate the arguments in Camera Lucida; it wasn't artifice that generated Roland Barthes’s 'punctum' but the incidental (or maybe semi-planned) signs of how the images were made that invited a fond gaze. And this is very much in evidence in this retrospective. Some of the images are like a sleight of hand, especially the shot of a dog balanced in midair as if suspended in time. Other outfits are not only the epitome of Barthes’s ‘punctum’, they are also humorous, with one hound wearing a brightly coloured wig, a dress while her thin, grey, elegant dog legs stick out from under a hem.
The balance between the absurd and the benign, the intimate and the ludicrous, the playful and the serious, make these works so much more than a game of dressing up and make-believe. Despite many of the images being well known or easy to find in books, there were many surprises. Shot over many decades, they reveal an innocent, imaginative working friendship between an animal and a human. The sense of dedication and longevity of this project - a lifelong relationship with an idea - makes these series seem as treasured as a marriage. Although different dogs are photographed by Wegman (this breed is renowned for enjoying the theatre of dressing up and posing), there is a sense of quiet, unrestrained continuity. These shots are so much more than poster displays of the dressed-up dog found on social media. They are reverential, fused with a subdued respect for Man Ray and his many descendants who have all been this devoted photographer's calm, patient collaborators.
The Hague Museum of Photography worked in collaboration with renowned guest curator William A. Ewing and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP) to enable this exhibition to take place
Text by Siobhan Wall 2020