What William Wegman (and His Weimaraners) Can Teach Us About Being Human

What is it about dogs? Our loyal friends (“man’s best,” in fact) have inspired poems and novels and memoirs and Disney franchises and feelings that run the range of familial love to something, in fact, dearer because you’re not related and forced together by biology, but chosen instead. “Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and their barks heralded the Anthropocene,” The Atlantic wrote last year, adding: “We raised puppies well before we raised kittens or chickens; before we herded cows, goats, pigs, and sheep; before we planted rice, wheat, barley, and corn; before we remade the world.” (“We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs,” National Geographic asserted in 2013. “They Domesticated Us.”) The aborigines say that “dogs make people human,” Sigrid Nunez writes in her February 2018 novel, The Friend, in which, in part, she unspools a meditation on the particularly canine innocence “which humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return,” but where dogs live and love and die; and of a lure between the species that hooks and pulls the two together and defies any real explanation. Small children cuddle stuffed puppies with enormous, cartoon eyes (and their sentient inspirations, when they can get their mitts on them), but they want to be them, too— sensing even at the tenderest ages what James Thurber called the “dog wish,” which is, of course, “a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.” How much easier to be on all fours in this strange brutal world, guileless and guided through life by your nose, your instinct, the promise of eventual dinner, and the safety of your pack (of humans, of other dogs, or other animals). Sometimes that pack is just a pair, really. In William Wegman’s case, in the beginning, it was just him and Man Ray.

It’s impossible to discuss Wegman’s work—which includes photographs and video art, paintings, and drawings, two Guggenheim fellowships and one from the National Endowment for the Arts, segments on Sesame Street, Saturday Night Live, and David Letterman’s Late Night, and inclusion in the Walker Arts Center, The Whitney, the Smithsonian, and the Australian National Gallery, and most recently the newly released photography book William Wegman: Being Human—without mentioning Man Ray. And anyway, why wouldn’t you want to? These days there are other dogs, Flo and Topper, and a wife and adult children and a photography studio and accordant employees and collaborators, but Man Ray was the ur-dog; a steel colored Weimaraner with Brancusi curves and soft eyes and a certain mutability in front of the camera, who set the bar for all who followed— as your first real dog is wont to do, even when they’re not famous—and who, the artist deadpans, during a balmy mid-September studio visit, he probably should have named something else, out of respect for the seminal surrealist, who is now likely overshadowed by his canine namesake. In William Wegman’s circles, this is undoubtedly the case.

Wegman, who is 73, received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston, and his MFA from the University of Illinois. He was teaching conceptual art and photography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and, as the story goes, was having that feeling (distinctly common to the late 1960s) that painting was dead, when a certain geometric abstraction inherent to a slice of cotto salami caught his eye at a party. “It had that kind of strange beauty” that was free of the theories and concepts he’d been freighted with in academia, he told Salon in 2000. “And so I set it up and the photo came out amazing. And I never took a photograph like that, that was so graphically strong. It cleared my mind.” It was during this artistically fecund time that dogs entered the picture.

The important thing to know is that Wegman was an artist before his dogs, and he is one after his dogs and during his dogs, too. He secured his place in art history when “he became the first person to prove that video art could be laugh-out-loud funny,” The New York Times wrote in 2006 in a review of his Brooklyn Museum show, “William Wegman: Funney/Strange,” in which the artist was also identified as “the most accessible and, in his own way, richly human of all Conceptual artists,” as well as one of the most important “to emerge from the heady experiments of the 1970’s.” Wegman doesn’t seem to mind his painting or his pivotal role in the history of video art being overshadowed by his photography—it is, in a sense, the best of both worlds. “I’ve never been asked to go on a talk show to talk about my paintings,” he says, happily, amid a tour of the rambling Chelsea complex that is his home and studio (and was, 20 years ago, a plant wholesaler topped by a preschool), as Flo and Topper’s toenails click merrily on the concrete floors. The dogs rule the roost. Are they allowed on furniture? “Of course,” he says. “They look great on furniture.” As if on cue, they bookend themselves around him on a leather couch, and pose, in profile, like sphinges.

As legend has it, Wegman hadn’t really wanted a dog, but his first wife talked him into it; they agreed on a shorthaired breed, Dalmatians weren’t available, Weimaraners had a good reputation, and fortuitously there was an ad in the newspaper for puppies: $35. “So I flipped a coin and it came up tails five times in a row,” he says. They met the litter; it was a coup de foudre. They scooped up their puppy and drove home. “The first thing I did when I got Man Ray home was to take his picture: on the bed; deep asleep, a sock on the bed near him,” Wegman writes in his 1999 book, Puppies, “There was a similarity between this sock and Man Ray. Man Ray looked like many things. This idea grew on me.” The dog began to accompany Wegman to the studio and soon became subject. Deviations from this arrangement—returns to painting, say, or drawing, or other solo endeavors—were met with clear canine displeasure. “Ray sulked around the house,” Wegman remembered. “Now and then he would stalk into the darkroom, glare at me for a minute, then turn around and walk out.” The use of the hulking, intractable Polaroid 20x24 followed, in a series of portraits that the critic Sanford Schwartz would compare in The New York Review of Books to Robert Frank’s “The Americans” in its emotional fullness and range. (“Man Ray . . . has one of the most intelligent, alert, and handsome faces in the history of photography,” Schwartz wrote. “If he were a man, he might be a leader, a hero; the mixture of gravity and self-possession in his face would make men willing to follow him anywhere.”)

Wegman is now incredibly famous for these lush, surrealistic, brilliantly strange pictures of Weimaraners in various poses and stages of dress. (The exhibition accompanying the book’s release, at his gallery, Sperone Westwater, is titled “Dressed and Undressed”.) “I didn’t want to do dressed-up dog stuff, for some reason,” Wegman says, “but it just happened.” (He now maintains racks of clothing in his basement, where he has modified frocks and vests and all manner of attire for his models, depending on their role: art world doyenne, say, or Cinderella’s ugly stepmother; the latter feels especially apt considering the adoption dynamic between human and canine, he thinks.) In the British dog-focused magazine Four&Sons, he expanded further: “At one time I wanted to avoid anthropomorphism,” Wegman explained. “Then I embraced it with Fay-Ray, but even when I dressed her up it was more eerie than cute. She looked almost sinister, like the hybrid creatures from mythology. I was working with a large-format Polaroid camera, which is the size of a refrigerator. It’s always vertical, so I had put Fay-Ray on a table to look taller, with fabric hung over her. My assistant was behind her to keep the fabric from falling, and I could only see her hands. So it looked like Fay was talking to me, which was hilarious and very weird! So I took that picture and thought it was exciting and a little dangerous. Like a lot of my work, I recognized something accidentally.”

Some of Wegman’s Weimaraners wear couture, some wear nothing at all. Some are in drag as other beasts, or objects, or works by other artists. “My dogs, I think, because they’re gray, have given me such latitude also, that sort of neutral tone they have, this blackness . . . sort of a blank, ghosty look,” Wegman says. “They also reflect light differently than other dogs. They look brown inside and blue outside. They can transform.” From his 1999 book, Fay: ”I see a lot of photographs of dogs in hats and sunglasses. Cute pictures. People started sending them to me years ago, and now I have quite a few, perhaps a zillion. I am known by many as the guy who dresses up his dog. Guilty.” But he rarely dressed up Man Ray, at least not in human clothes. “It never seemed right. Instead I transformed him into other animals, an elephant, a frog, an Airedale, using found props and compositional devices—a sock, swim fins, a Ping-Pong ball cut in half, tinsel wrapped a certain way. Outside the studio I never went about dressing the dogs for my own amusement. It’s not done as a joke in a spontaneous moment of whimsy. Not that dogs mind it, mind you. They will go along with just about anything you do as long as it keeps them in the game. Don’t laugh at them, don’t confuse them or hurt their feelings.” Quoth James Thurber: “The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.”

In Man’s Best Friend, a 1999 book dedicated to Man Ray, Laurance Wieder notes in his introduction that Wegman finds an artistic freedom in his unfettered ability to gaze at his dogs “with a mixture of love and detachment.” (In the same passage, Wegman furthers that “to stare that way at a person would be too embarrassing.”) They worked happily together for 11 years, but as is true of all models, age was cruel. “I hated to see him get older,” Wegman wrote. “That’s a real problem in using one subject over so many years.” The year that the Village Voice named him their Man of the Year, Man Ray died of pancreatic cancer, which is the devastating trade-off inherent to our canine companions: Their innocence belies the experience that their all-too-brief lives give us.

More dogs followed, after a respectful pause, including the cinnamon-gray Fay Ray, who was no less a star than her predecessor, though she had a different quality from the very beginning. “Man Ray filled the picture plane in a very solid way, and Fay sort of coiled into it,” Wegman told Smithsonian in 2011. Man Ray “was a larger and more static dog who projected a kind of stoic, Everyman thing. . . . [Fay’s] eyes seemed to bring an electricity to the picture.” Fay was bred, and her litter of puppies was delivered by Wegman himself, a week premature, as he recounts in Puppies (“I recall saying, ‘Oh, my God!’ five times during this event”). Several would become and sire other models, too. Many of these—Candy, Bobbin, Batty, Crooky, Chip, Chundo, and others—are represented in the book. The most dogs he has kept at one time is “around five,” which, the artist admits, is “probably too many,” especially since they sleep in bed with him and his wife. And thus, the so-called Weimaraner Republic, with its divisions in publishing, television, video, commercials, posters, postcards and refrigerator magnets, bloodlines and palace intrigues, and the varying personalities of its enigmatic, inscrutable stars, began.

Being Human is but the latest in a lifetime of these undertakings, which have been littered with books for adults and children and collectors and novices alike. It really happened out of chance. “I have thousands of Polaroids in storage” from the past 30 years of work, says Wegman, and a series of drawers and cabinets between his studio and his living room reveal that yes, in fact, he does. “I was going through all of them and finding the ones I’d kind of stuck away in boxes.” Did anything surprise him, looking back at all that film? “That I really haven’t really thought of anything new, ever,” he says, though in the press materials for the Sperone Westwater exhibition, he allows himself some nostalgia: Looking through the boxes backwards from 2007 was an “exhilarating experience,” he writes. “I could see all my beloved dogs, from Candy and Bobbin to Batty and Fay, grow younger and younger and younger; the images went back to a time before they existed, back to Man Ray, where it all began.”