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Giving The Dog A Strobe: Interview with Photographer William Wegman
 Who is the most famous dog in America? Rin Tin Tin and Lassie were adored by earlier generations of Americans, and whatever dog Lorne Greene was fattening up with Alpo certainly got his day. But German shepherds, collies and fourteen-year old mutts (that’s almost 90 to you and me) are out. Weimaranars, thanks to photographer William Wegman, are in.
"In some way, it’s corrupted what people think I’m doing." Says Wegman, speaking by phone from his New York studio. "It’s given them a completely easy answer — the guy with the dogs — and it’s prevented them from seeing what I consider 85 percent of my work, [which is] without the dogs. The 15 percent is extremely important to me, but it’s not the whole thing."
Whatever you say, Bill.
The mild-mannered, rumpled and friendly Wegman has an artistic oeuvre that does include performance, installation, drawing, painting, film and video. But his dog photographs, which have been in countless fashion spreads, on magazine covers, and in books worldwide over the last twenty years, will remain his enduring artistic legacy. The cutesy canines carry his name, for better or worse.
Dalmatians Aren’t Nearly As Funny
Wegman grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts and went to art school in Boston. There he learned "not to paint, that painting was dead." He taught in Wisconsin after obtaining his master’s degree in art from the University of Illinois, and he lived for a while in the blue-collar port town of San Pedro, California while teaching at nearby Long Beach State. It was there that a fortuitous circumstance changed his life and career, sending his artistic direction to the dogs.
“Gayle [Wegman’s former wife] wanted a dog and she liked short-haired dogs, but we couldn’t find any Dalmatians," recalls Wegman. "Someone said, ‘Weimaraners are good dogs’ and I saw an ad in the newspaper that had Weimaraners for $35. I could afford that, and [the dog] turned out to be Man Ray and well worth the investment. Because I was using cameras and video and stuff around the house, he just walked right into me in a sense, but he was so much fun to use and his behavior was so attuned to it, that I started to develop more work for him…A miracle is a good way to describe it."
Man Ray first appeared in simple, black-and-white portraits on the beach, and in Wegman’s cheap and wryly humorous videos, most of which are less than a minute long. In one video, Man Ray regards Wegman quizzically as his master scolds him for misspelling. In another, Wegman is on all fours, spitting out a trail of milk as he backs away from the camera on the kitchen floor. Man Ray enters from behind the door from which Wegman exited, slowly licking up the milk trail. He looms larger and larger in the screen until his nose collides with the camera with a loud smack, a sound cut that abruptly ends the piece.
My, What A Big Camera You’ve Got
In 1978, a friend who understood Wegman’s spontaneous work style told him about a special camera designed by Polaroid that made oversize, 20 x 24 inch prints. Wegman was intrigued but skeptical. “I didn’t really like color; I didn’t know what to do with it,” he admits. “But it was really great, and I’ve been using it ever since…In a way, I’m one of the supporters of Polaroid because they don’t make a lot of money on this [camera]. If I didn’t rent it, and a few other key people, they just wouldn’t bother doing it.” (The other “key people” include such major artistic talents like Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, and Lucas Samaras.)
Man Ray was Wegman’s muse in the big Polaroid adventure, modeling for hundreds of photographs, in things like roller skates, dresses, flippers and aluminum foil. The ironic juxtaposition of animal playing human caught the attention of the public and made Wegman’s work an instant success and Man Ray a lovable star.
Wegman continues to rent the camera for ten days about every six weeks, at a cost of $30,000. “They come up in a big truck with all these lights and racks, you know, it’s a big ordeal,” says Wegman. “We have a crew of ten; it’s like producing a little film.”
Getting The Brush Off
When Man Ray died in 1982, Wegman continued to shoot other subjects but in 1985, he pushed photography aside and tried to paint again. He hadn’t put a brush to canvas in twenty years. "I was not painting, purposely, and then I asked myself, ‘Why not?’ I became curious what it would look like if I painted and I was really quite frightened," admits Wegman. "[Painting] has such an historical weight that I dreaded actually doing one, but that became a challenge.
"My last paintings in grad school has shaped canvasses with things that glowed in the dark and looked like some offshoot of Frank Stella," he continues. "I went back to where I left off before art school, back to my teenage years, picking on those subjects from the World Book Encyclopedia or Field and Stream, really adolescent themes."
Doggy Days Are Here Again
In 1986, Wegman received another Weimaraner as a gift. Naming her Fay, Wegman waited until she was almost two years old before taking her picture. "I didn’t want to repeat or, in any way, cloud the work I had done with Man Ray," Wegman says. "But I’d really been denying myself this incredible pleasure and also denying the dog something that [she] really loves doing.
"Hunting dogs in general need a kind of serious purpose," he continues. "I don’t think dogs need to be photographed or need to work, but…they’re not bred just to sit around on your lap or twiddle about. If you’ve ever seen one in the field hunting, it’s this serious, intense, charged-up thing and they’re really obsessive about it. They need something important to do, and they become noble by doing it…Since I don’t hunt, [posing for photographs] really gives them something [noble] to do."
Beginning in January, Wegman will have solo shows in New York at Holly Solomon and Pace/MacGill, and a major retrospective of his paintings, photographs, and drawings from 1970 to 1990 will open at The Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit, which Wegman changes in each city (“I get so bored seeing the same work,” he sighs), is returning from Europe, through which it has been touring since 1988. Yet despite the increasing renown Wegman has achieved over the last decade — including numerous books and a portrait of Wegman and Fay by Annie Liebovitz for a GAP advertisement — he insists that fortune does not necessarily follow fame.
"People are always saying I’m commercially successful but the amount of money I make is extremely small compared to a successful painter," laments Wegman. "Really, it’s a fraction. Photographs are expensive to make and you have to sell so many of them [to make a profit]…I’m not poor and I’ve had a steady enough income where I don’t have to teach, but I’m probably more well-known than commercially successful."
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