This is Breadsticks. He had to leave us last Friday (the same day that the Bidens had to say good-bye to their dog Champ). It was time.
It helps me to build a bit of emotional distance to think about how I made this image and what I learned from it. It was no trick at all to get him to chase a ball into a pile of leaves: there was nothing he liked better and he would keep doing it as long as a person would keep throwing. But to get a good picture of it from the other end of the throw was surprisingly hard. Like a lot of action shots, it’s a true fiction. Meaning, this is how it really looked, time after time, but getting that exact moment? It took shot after shot, even with a repeating shutter. Either he blinked or came out in the wrong place or I got a blur or the leaves scattered wrong. When you see action photography, or photography of action in the natural world, and it’s clear and perfectly composed, you’re either seeing something that took a lot of time to set up and a lot of repetition to get right or you’re seeing an astonishing moment of serendipity, however prepared or alert the photographer was.
And of course, you are seeing, as per Sontag, a photographer who is studiously outside the action of the image. Normally, I was the one throwing to my dog: it was our thing. In this, I’m at the other end, and I have an apprentice. Didn’t bother him at all, as you can see. What did I get? A document, peculiarly enough, of a repeated moment that I only witnessed in the making of this photo—how it looked as he came triumphant out of a leaf pile, from his height.
This, on the other hand, took no rehearsal, and it was a scene so predictably seen and repeated from my perspective that I could idly decide to snap it as a candid one evening. I couldn’t have taken it like this before I was comfortable making my own decisions about focus, but the craft of it was otherwise uncontrived. I don’t know that anybody could know the difference in the making from the position of a spectator, however, and the problem of photography in the modern age has always been that it invites viewers to be (perhaps consciously, perhaps not) confused about the difference between artifice and actuality.