Last Friday, I went to a fundraiser put on by the Cleveland Animal Protective League (APL) at a local art gallery. There I met Amanda Jones, one of the leading US pet photographers. Her pictures have an uncanny knack of capturing the personality of the dog or cat, not just taking a portrait, which is what makes her photos very appealing.
Funnily enough, there was an article in the NY Times Style section this weekend about Amanda and her clients. Unfortunately you need a subscription to read it after this week, but I thought you might like this excerpt:
In addition to doing portraits (her work is online at amandajones.com), Ms. Jones has also published three books featuring dog photographs, the last of which, "Dachshunds Short and Long" (Berkley), came out in October. To find models, she posted a request on Craigslist for fit, well-behaved and well-groomed dachshunds, a strategy, she said, that provided mixed results. "I had one girl tell me she had the most beautiful long-haired dachshund in the world," Ms. Jones said. "Then she showed up for the shoot and the dog was probably seven pounds overweight and not that cute at all. And she barked at me the whole time."
Allison McCabe, Ms. Jones's editor, was also on the shoot. "There was a lot of naked ambition of people who wanted their dogs on the cover," Ms. McCabe said. "Some people were fine, but others made me think of 'Best in Show.' They'd say, 'My dog didn't have enough time.' Or, 'My dog was just getting warmed up.' "
Ms. McCabe, who recently left Berkley for Random House, first discovered Ms. Jones's work a couple years ago, when she was seeking a photographer for a book on greyhounds. "There's a lot of pet photography that's very cloying, very sentimental," Ms. McCabe said. "Amanda gets past that. She has a good rapport with dogs and gets them to be themselves on camera - she gets the expression in their eyes that you see and say, 'Yes, that's my dog.' "
