Some Dogs Whose Names I Forget.

When we first walked up to the house of our New Orleanian hosts (see last post), this little guy was standing in front of the big one, between his legs, and I about melted. Of course I couldn't get my camera out fast enough and they didn't do this cute thing again during our entire stay but I still got some fun shots whenever I could keep them far away enough from me to focus. Such friendly dogs.


Sorry, but I've got to indulge in a tiny bit of projection/anthropomorphism. That little dog reminds me of myself when I'm pretending to be tall-- I stick my nose in the air, extend my neck as far as it will go, and puff out my chest. And that big dog is totally smiling. He knows he won the height contest, and he was barely trying.

I've had a theory in the works since sharing a city with snobby Parisian dogs, that dogs' friendliness is proportional with that of their owners. Thoughts?


At my birthday party in March, Dominick Reuter and I passed his camera back and forth shooting goofy photos of my friends. By the end of the night the only way you could tell who'd shot which photo was that his were all from a much higher perspective (kid is a couple of feet taller than I am.) Point being: I've been trying lately to get my camera off my face so that all my pictures aren't from the same perspective. For this and the last one I held the camera at about knee-height, and got this guy to look up at me.


This is not an example of the effort I just explained, but I was playing with what Bruce Lipsky told me-- this photo has a clear point of view (my face!)



I call this one "Role Model". It'd dedicated to my mentor, former TA, former editor, and close friend, Ms. Phoebe Anne Sexton. I assume she likes friendly dogs.