Books

Retrieved

Charlotte Dumas

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 13, 2011
Category: Art and Photography

If you are not a dog person — and I’m so not — you have to bite your tongue when a dog lover bangs on about an animal’s soulfulness.

I mean, I concede that animals have souls.

I just don’t particularly think that they’re wired for all the terrific traits — love, loyalty, and such — that their owners ascribe to them.

And then I read a story like Dog mourns at casket of fallen Navy SEAL and I have to button my lip.

So it is with the photographs of the 15 dogs in "Retrieved."

Back story: Right after 9/11, a hundred “search” dogs — from a network of 26 task forces in 18 states — were brought to New York and Washington. Finding survivors in the rubble never happened. What they did find…

Well, we don’t know what they found. And not because dogs can’t talk. Charlotte Dumas, the photographer who took the photographs of the 15 dogs still living a decade later, is not interested in words. In fact, she’s so uninterested in words that when she went around the country taking the photographs for “Retrieved,” she seems only to have asked the handlers for their dog’s place and length of service. And did she prod the search-and-rescue teams to talk about the comfort they got from these dogs? Nope.

This is a book with almost no words.

Just as crazy is the layout of "Retrieved." Each dog gets a two-page spread. The backgrounds don’t matter much — the dogs were photographed in their handlers’ homes — so the book stands or falls on the emotional wallop we get from the animals. But why, if the dog is in the center of the frame, design a book that splits him/her in half?

Clearly, “dog logic” is the overriding factor in the creation — and consumption — of this book. [To buy it from Amazon, click here.]

Only 15 of the hundred search dogs were alive when Dumas took these pictures. Four more died before publication. These are old dogs, living out the end of their days, and that, the photographer says — not in the book, of course — is what’s really going on here:

“These portraits are about how time passes, and how these dogs and their portraits are offering us a way to deal with the things that happened as well as relying on them for comfort.”

The churl in me cries bullshit. Portraits of dogs are “a way to deal with the things that happened” — how, exactly, does that work?

But the churl in me is not why I’m featuring this book. Because the churl in me now takes a back seat to Those Who Know Better — people who know dogs, love dogs, spend outrageous amounts of time and money on their pets. People who look into a dog’s eyes and see soul.

If you are one of those people, you will look at this gallery. You will see all I do not. Your heart will pound. You’ll buy the book. More: you’ll give it to other dog lovers.

And I will envy all that you feel.