The man hovers, he thinks, just of frame, the hand on knee ready to grab and stay. But the dog has spotted something offstage and if he’s still it’s just for that muscle-tightening split-second before the leap. I love how this tattered cardboard frame barely contains the action of this little scene, a not-quite-perfectly-captured moment.
I imagine a mom taking this photo — an exasperated mom who goes to all the trouble of dressing her boy in a cleaned and ironed white sailor suit (immediately wrinkled again) and pulls a wet comb through his hair (the marks are still visible in his bowl cut) and then despairs when neither boy nor dog will hold still in the hot sun and ALL SHE WANTS IS JUST ONE GOOD PHOTO. The boy’s expression, his stranglehold on his new puppy say it all. Sitting for mom photographs is an exquisite kind of kid torture, and that sailor suit is being ripped off and thrown under the bed the minute the camera clicks.
“Sunday Morning” featured a piece about “Our Town” last week. It’s reportedly the most produced play in America, maybe because it calls for so little scenery, but more likely because it touches on that sinking feeling we all get sometimes that we are failing to “realize life while (we) live it,” that we aren’t appreciating who and what we have while we have them. Then the phone rings, the incoming email dings, and we forget again.
This positive image from a rare glass negative came from a friend’s family collection. It traveled over time to her without a chip, but also without a name or date or anything about the forgotten relatives who owned it. Studying the carving on the rocker, the little mat underneath, the dog’s round metal tag, the name plates by the screen door, the rooms of hidden objects behind, I think these were somebody’s “clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths …” These were somebody’s ordinary and everyday, and maybe they appreciated them, and maybe they didn’t, and now they’re all gone, all save this photo.
He wouldn’t stop moving for the picture. They must have expected as much — the woman in white brought a treat to bribe him during the long exposure, ruining the symmetry of her puffed sleeves to offer it at the crucial moment. Still, in the photo, he’s a fuzzy blur of a dog, and her hand’s blurry too, a strange bit of movement in an image so carefully arranged and still.
It’s hard to tell how the people are related. Their ages, their resemblances reveal no definitive answer. But we know how they felt about their dog, front row, center. We know how the woman in black beside him, only partially containing her smile, felt.
People don’t write on the backs of their photos. They don’t now — they don’t even have photographic prints to write on the backs of now — and they didn’t then. Among the dozens and dozens of vintage and historic dog photos I have, only a small handful bear a name or year scrawled in pencil on the back.
In the face of so little information, the image itself is its best clue, and not just the people’s clothing and the background architectural details and the type of print it is, all hinting at times and places. Root around in dusty old boxes of photos long enough, and themes begin to emerge.
Dogs sitting on chairs — that’s a common pattern and one I especially like.
The photographer of this happy mutt, like the photographers of so many others, sat him on a chair first. As if to get him at his best angle, he or she brought the dog up closer to eye level, closer to the lens, closer to the viewer. There’s a tendency toward personification in the old photos, with picture-takers making dogs smoke pipes or wear hats, and there is an element of that here, but because it isn’t part of a joke, the act seems more tender. The beloved dog sits on the familiar chair, and not as part of a children’s tableau, family portrait or landscape. The frame is his, the focus his, the chair his makeshift pedestal. And it’s hard not to feel he understands, smiling as he does into the camera.
