Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves. Ann-Janine Morey

around this dichotomy, the actuality is much richer. Alan Trachtenberg encourages us to study photographic “ensembles” that offer an “intelligible view of society implicit in the internal dialogue of images and texts, and their external dialogue with their times.”¹⁶ Observing Lewis Hine’s work as part of a visual narrative, Trachtenberg suggests both the enduring power of “social photography”—what Hine later called “moral realism”—and the accumulated narrative power of photographs gathered together. Photographic artifacts command a narrative presence on multiple fronts: as individual aesthetic expression, as symbols speaking from within a larger nexus, and as documents or records of times, events, and people.

      Some photographs may partake of the dense intersection of both life story and public event, so that “social photography” refers to the effort to document historical realities, such as the work of Jacob Riis, who took his improvised camera equipment into New York City’s Lower East Side. But even at that early stage, the documentary function of photography was a complicated construct, for Riis staged some of his starkest images in order to enhance their implicit narrative power. And while Alfred Stieglitz was arguing that composition and tone virtually commanded photography into art, Lewis Hine was seeking that powerful intersection between the accidental and the composed in order to preserve the narrative power elicited by his images. For Hine, who often took great risks in taking pictures under arduous conditions, the accidental observations of the camera were part of its artistic and moral value.

      In a later development, when Henry Luce planned Life magazine, he envisioned a format in which text and pictures worked together, seeing photographs—layout, composition, sequence—as commentary and documentary. Luce understood “sequenced photographs as rhetoric,” suggesting that “photographs are like written language that can be manipulated and that interpret events.”¹⁷ Initially, the photographer supplied the raw images but had little control over how they were used. W. Eugene Smith struggled to maintain editorial control over his images by researching and writing the printed text and selecting, editing, annotating, and arranging the pictures into a coherent essay. His work increasingly sought to guide the reader’s values and perceptions, controlling not only aesthetic and narrative reading but also political and ideological reading, and Smith’s passion for social justice led him into intricate manipulations of his images in the service of this vision. Hine was working toward the same kind of rhetorical control. His preference for the term “interpretive photography” never really caught on, “yet it was there from the beginning of his career and was an attempt to define, even at the start, the peculiar synthesis of aesthetic and social purposes that he was aiming at.”¹⁸

      My collection does not meet the definition of “social photography,” because in the case of Riis, Hine, and Smith, the photographer’s intention is an integral part of how the picture is defined. These photographers were trying to reveal the simultaneity of personal lives and public forces, seeking ways to embrace the beauty, ambiguity, and narrative implications of the images they created. But family and private relationships are inextricably entwined with the larger matrix of cultural forces and public history, no matter what the photographer’s intent. To distinguish the largely anonymous photographers who produced the images in this book from the self-conscious artistry of people like Hine or Smith, my collection might best be referred to as “vernacular photography,” in that these images reveal “no apparent aesthetic ambition other than to record what passes in front of the camera with reasonable fidelity.”¹⁹ With the possible exception of images commissioned by wealthy people from famous photographers, vernacular photographs are truly “folk” images—by and of the people. At the conclusion of Counter-Archive, Paula Amad talks about what it means to reclaim the everyday life of artifacts (in her discussion, it’s film), noting that working with these materials is at once enchanting and boring, constituting a remarkable space where “lostness” and “foundness” exist side by side, where discovery creates the future, re-creates the past, and then complicates the future once more. The everyday vernacular life embodied in these folk relics contain culturally significant memory at the same time that they project our fantasies for the future.

      The conventions of dog photography as they emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century are not especially surprising, and it assists our interpretation to recognize that while certain mannerisms were adopted for the portraits, deviation from those mannerisms is also part of the communication. Here I borrow an insight from folklore studies by way of emphasizing the origin of these “folk” pictures and the narrative qualities highlighted by bringing forward groups of images. Generally speaking, the formulaic nature of folklore—which consists of patterned repetitions—is how storytelling was adapted for memory and oral performance. Those patterned repetitions, as well as departures from the formula, are part of the heritage of folktales. To adapt to the visual context, we can look for the pattern of presentation, finding insight in that pattern, and then discover further insight when the pattern of presentation is shifted or reinforced, despite the resulting incongruities.

      The connection between vernacular photography and folklore is useful because, unlike Trachtenberg’s Civil War photographs, my pictures have no compelling cultural event that immediately supplies a primary context. They are everyday images of ordinary people whose names, families, and social location are lost to us. How, then, can we reclaim the communication represented by their presence? The answer is that groups of common images can communicate something that a solitary image cannot. I am reading my way through these photographs using the perspectives of both visual studies and animal studies, perspectives that further coalesce the message of these pictures.