November 1997
Q: When is a puppy not a puppy?
A: When William Wegman photographs it
Interview by Alden Mudge
In art school in the sixties, William Wegman scorned photography. "I hated it," he proclaims with a mixture of wistfulness and droll humor. "I had wicked arguments with the photography department. I didn't think what they were doing was Art. Besides, photography just wasn't in my Manifesto."
So how did Wegman get from his youthful hard-edged certitude to "Puppies" (Hyperion, $24.95, 0786803207), his just-published photo essay about the birth and puppyhood of his now-famous weimaraners?
To begin with there was Man Ray. The dog not the surrealist. According to Wegman, getting this first weimaraner was his wife's idea. But once the six-week-old puppy was home, Wegman recalls, "he provoked me. Weimaraners require more work than you'd realize from looking at my photographs. So instead of going crazy listening to Man Ray whimpering, I thought I might as well engage him somehow in my art. From the beginning he gave me ideas, and he ended up changing the way I thought about my work.
"I was working then -- this was in the early seventies -- from a conceptual, minimalist art perspective. I'd put a chair and a box in the corner of a room and photograph it in various positions. In the beginning Man Ray was just a gray object. I'd use him as a kind of space modulator with eyes. The eyes added something but I wasn't quite sure what. The longer I worked with him, the more affectionate I became and the more those eyes began to add their own meaning. I tried to subvert that. Being a "cool' artist, the last thing I wanted was sentimentality in my work. I strived to minimize it, but it was just there whether I wanted to admit it or not. And once I did admit it, my manifesto broke down."
Lucky thing. The breakdown seemed to unleash the witty, satiric, deadpan humor that suffuses so many of the photographs and videos of his weimaraners -- Man Ray, Fay Ray, Crooky, Batty, Chundo and Chip. It's a quality that has made him one of America's best-known and most popular artists.
That same playful touch can be seen in the photographs of "Puppies." "When puppies are born," Wegman says, "it is the most exciting thing. They require and demand your whole attention. But it's all so short. The stages they go through are so brief that you hardly even realize you've done anything when it's over. I'd been through it twice personally, having raised Fay's litter and Batty's litter, and I've taken a lot of pictures of Crooky's litter also. I knew I had a different attitude about puppies than many people have, since I had seen them born, and I wanted to put that in a book. I like books. They are the way to get my work out to a larger audience, beyond the museum and gallery structure. That was also in my manifesto back in the sixties. I just had no idea that this part of my manifesto would really come true through my dog and children's books."
Wegman's own favorite pictures in "Puppies" are the "magical photos" of Fay's puppies taken while Wegman tossed them in the air. They express, as he writes in the book,"joy, surprise, lightness, peace." First published as a suite of photographs in a limited edition magazine, they led him to continue photographing puppies, a markedly different enterprise from working with older dogs.
"Photographing puppies before their eyes are open requires one way of working. When they are a few weeks old, something else is required, and by the time they are twelve weeks old, it becomes almost impossible, unless one of them is Chip, who is always just staring at me. . . . As they become adults, each dog has his or her own way. Batty, for example, daydreams while I photograph her. She wanders in her mind, whereas Fay would just rivet her attention right on me."
Throughout our conversation, Wegman credits his dogs with a sort of artistic intelligence, as if they were full collaborators in the work. "You learn very quickly what not to ask them to do," he says. "If you ask them to do something that embarrasses them, you'll get the ears back, the nervous grin. It looks horrible."
"But sometimes," he admits, "I'm really surprised when a dog doesn't want to do something I suggest. Sometimes it's because I'm nervous and jumpy about technical things, lighting, the sets, the equipment, and so on, and I forget that this is a living creature here. For the cover of 'George' magazine, for example, I had in mind a shot with Chundo that I thought would be great. I put it all together and it was horrendous. Chundo was embarrassed by it. He didn't want to wear the hat, didn't like the wig, and didn't know the people around him. It was a nightmare. I was getting crazed and Chundo must have been thinking 'Yikes! Bill is not Bill today.' I had to calm down and tell myself it wasn't worth getting crazed about. I had to go back and become that person who Chundo loves, and once I did, it was not a problem."
"Puppies" is particularly influenced by Wegman's extraordinary relationship with his second weimaraner, Fay, to whom the book is dedicated. Fay died three weeks after the puppies of the last litter in the series were born, and some of the photographs here seem tinged with this sad knowledge. Fay's death, says Wegman, was one in a series of events "that brought the whole life and death cycle close to home. A month before Fay was diagnosed with acute leukemia, my sister's son was killed in a car accident. Six months before, my own son was born. It was very hard to have this incredible attachment to these puppies and then to have so much grief too. I was ecstatic about my son, ecstatic about the puppies, and torn by the deaths of Zack and of Fay."
Speaking of these events puts Wegman in a reflective mood. "I don't do formulaic work," he declares. "If I've done something before and find myself doing it again, I get nervous. There has to be a very good reason to do it; I have to have found something new about it. But post card and greeting card companies always want the same thing. If one artist won't give it to them, they'll find another who will. It's their job to give people what they want. My job is a little unclear. It is to try something I'm not entirely sure about, something that resonates more. If I'm really lucky -- and this happens maybe once every five years -- something completely amazing happens. When it does, it's usually because the dog has given something special and unexpected."
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