Nothing is 'captured'
The Art of Dog Photography
She is 12 now.
Undeniably 12.
The words “hold your pose” live in her bones the way wind lives in the pines. Bella settles into position – the majestic good girl she has always been – framed by something dramatic, something epic, some wild corner of the Inland Northwest that never fails to take my breath away.
And yet it never really matters where we are. It never has. She is always the star. The landscape is a supporting character. The light is a blessing. The camera is a tool.
The moment, the feeling, the soul – that’s her.
Every time I lift the camera to my eye, I’m reminded why I despise the word “capture.”
It’s violent. An extraction. An implication that I’m here to seize or trap or take something from her. The word tastes like conquest, not connection. It echoes with the history of photography’s darker roots -- when the camera was used to catalog, colonize and classify.
Some Indigenous nations resisted early photography because they believed the camera could steal a piece of the spirit. Given the way photography functioned in the hands of the powerful back then – used to catalog the “exotic,” justify colonization and reduce living, complex people to specimens – I’m not convinced they were wrong. That history is long and complicated and deserves its own reckoning. But it’s not the history we’re here for today.
