We Do Not Have Long With Our Dogs

I am a London dog photographer, and every session I take is built around one idea, that a dog photographed properly now becomes the photograph a family holds onto for the rest of their lives.

There is a particular kind of arithmetic every dog owner does eventually, usually without meaning to. You work out roughly how many years you might reasonably have left with him, and the number is always smaller than feels fair. A dog moves through an entire life while we are still in the middle of ours. Puppy to steady adult to grey around the muzzle, all inside a stretch of time that, for us, barely registers as a chapter.

We tend to assume there will be time for the proper photograph later. Later, when the house is tidier. Later, when he has recovered from the limp, or grown into his ears, or stopped being quite so restless around a camera. Later becomes a placeholder we never quite get around to filling.

This is not said to unsettle you.

It is said because it is simply true, and because it is the truest reason to have your dog photographed properly while you still can, rather than waiting for a version of the moment that suits you better.

What a good portrait does, in the end, is hold onto something that time will not. Not the whole dog, nothing could do that, but a true likeness of him exactly as he was in that particular season of his life. The tilt of his head. The specific way he held his ears when he was listening for you. The eyes that, whatever else changes about a dog as he ages, tend to stay entirely his own.

There is gratitude in portraits like this, not grief. A photograph taken with real care becomes something you are glad to have, not simply because of what it shows, but because of what it means that you took the time to have it made at all. It says that this dog, in this particular chapter, mattered enough to stop and properly see.

I do not say this to create urgency for its own sake. I say it because it happens to be the one thing about a dog's life that never reverses itself. The years move in a single direction, and the photographs are what we are left holding onto, long after the years themselves have gone.

If there has been a photograph of your dog you have been meaning to have taken, this is me, gently, saying now might be the better time than later.