My Mum is a photographer; Dogs.

October 22, 2011

My Mum was born in 1951 in Coventry. After High School she attended Stage School before venturing south to the warmer climes of Portugal in 1971 where she worked a variety jobs including assistant keeper at a monkey sanctuary.

It was in Lisbon that my Mum met my Dad and they returned to the U.K to marry in January 1974.

Nines months later they moved to Den Haag in Holland where my Mum commenced an apprenticeship at a poodle parlor in a rather notorious area of the city while my Dad worked as an engineer.

In 1978 they returned to England, specifically Cirencester, where my Mum developed and nurtured her successful dog grooming business, serving the needs and demands of both local and national dogs and their owners for over thirty years.

To commemorate her 60^th birthday in April I asked her to take before and after photographs of her regular clients, which I intend to compile into a small book in due course complete with a real dog coat cover, the first of its kind perhaps?

The photographs reveal the inherent ability of the camera to record and compare through accurate representation by aligning the before and after images side-by-side for immediate comparison and obvious difference through the passage of time.
In an article by Estelle Jussim titled The Eternal Moment: Photography and Time, published in Aperture in 1989, Ms Jussim draws attention to a sequence of photographs made by Robert Doisneau of a wedding party sat on a bench upon a raised platform: the image on the left shows the said wedding party, the image on the right shows the same scene emptied of people.
She notes;“The primary reason we ‘read’ this as “before and after” is that we read our written language from left to right, and therefore tend to read series of images in the same left-to-right sequence”. She goes on to say, “Readers of Hebrew, for example, or any other language read from right to left, might easily see the empty bench as the “before” and the wedding group portrait as the “after”. Perceptions of time sequence in photographic images may be as culture-derived as our written languages”.

Logic would suggest that the before and after dog photographs are precisely that; before and after. The dog arrives with shaggy, unkempt hair, and departs clipped and presentable. However, given that the photograph reveals little other than its surface content, it could imagined, reading from right to left, that the images were produced over a much longer period of time. That the “before” image was made upon the occasion that the dog was cropped and the “after” was made moments before its hair was removed once again, with a period of four or so months missing in-between.

Regardless of what cultural position the viewer takes, and their ability to suspend their disbelief, here are some of our favourites.