The American artist William Wegman has captivated audiences for over three decades with his charming, witty and inventive photographs featuring Weimaraner dogs. In 1979, when already established as a conceptual video and photographic artist, Wegman responded to a request to try out a new Polaroid camera. On the road trip to Boston Wegman was accompanied by his dog, Man Ray and it was then that a great collaboration was born. After Man Ray’s passing, Wegman later returned to the subject with a new muse, Fan Ray and her progeny. Since the 1980s Wegman has displayed an extraordinary creative versatility with his charming muses and directly demonstrated the characteristics unique to each creature.
Wegman’s troupe of dogs have been around his camera from an early age, watching their elders in action, and consequently have an innate knowledge of performance and posing. Wegman uses each in a different way, playing to the animal’s strengths and characteristics. They are willing participants in a playful studio process. Wegman has produced a number of distinctive series including: historic costumes on human bodies juxtaposed with a canine face, contemporary fashion shots, high-end couture, compositions with play with bold abstract colour and ‘nudes’ with anatomically challenging poses. In every work Wegman relishes the challenge of finding a new compositional arrangement, modulating form and space with careful consideration of what each model brings to the image. The results range from witty and comical to elegant and subtle, and even surreal and nostaligic.
Numerous retrospectives of Wegman's work have been made among them "Wegman's World," which opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1981 and toured the United States and "William Wegman: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Videotapes," which opened at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne in 1990 traveling to venues across Europe and the United States including the Pompidou Center, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. More recent exhibitions have included retrospectives in Sweden, Japan, Korea and Spain and, most recently the exhibition "Funney/Strange," which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006 with a catalogue published by Yale University, making its final stop at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus in the fall of 2007.
