ghost dog

Sniff from karolina sobecka on Vimeo.

Sobecka calls Sniff an "interactive public projection."  In her artist's statement, she asks the viewer/reader to imagine an urban interspecies encounter:

As you walk down the street you are approached by a dog. He cautiously and curiously sniffs you as he gets closer. He is on his guard trying to discern your intentions. He will follow you as you walk on and interpret your gestures as friendly or aggressive. He will try to engage you and get you to pay attention to him... As the viewer walks by the projection, her movements are tracked by a custom computer vision system. A CG dog comes up in the projection and sniffs her, following her as she moves in front of the display.

What's being narrated here is a multisensory meet-and-greet between two free-roaming agents - something which is happening less and less, I think, in our leash-lawed, obedience-trained streetscapes. Indeed, as the piece is actually staged, Sniff is not loose on the sidewalk but trapped behind a window. Despite his name, he can follow you but never actually sniff you. The "interaction" here ends up being decidedly one-sided: with Sniff always pacing, jumping, reacting, beseeching.

When I posted this on facebook my friend Paul commented: "shelter dog behavior." In his perceptive reading, Sniff is a projection not so much of dog-human social reciprocity as its opposite.

dogs of mississippi, 2009

* Also see dogs of mississippi, 1947

From "A World Away, Close to Family," a New York Times piece on African American city kids who spend their summers with relatives in the South (story by Robbie Brown, photos by James Patterson):

The sight of a menacing dog outside her Brooklyn apartment would send Amya CaJoie Stewart skittering inside for safety. But not the Rottweiler that prowled the gravel road at her aunt’s house in this sun-cooked rural town. In a flash of bravado, the prim 10-year-old lured the dog with a dish of water, lashed it to a post and named it Sam.

“That’s what you do in Mississippi,” Amya explained. “You tie the dogs in your yard.”

* * *

The matriarch of the family, Estella Mae Oaties, 81, supervises Amya during the day. Behind her house, she keeps several dogs as pets, and it is Amya's job to feed and water them. When she grows up, Amya says, she might want to become a veterinarian.

dogs of mississippi, 1947

* Also see dogs of mississippi, 2009

William Faulkner and his fyces (photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson, courtesy of Iconic Photos)

more eyes that have looked at jim crow

Just looked again at the photographs in my previous post about the early-20th century African American photographer Michael Francis Blake - was struck, suddenly, by the strange elision of dogs in that post. When I talked about the "eyes that have looked at Jim Crow," I was implicitly talking only of the eyes of the human beings in the pictures. Is it nonsensical to think of the dogs as also having witnessed segregation? To ask what racism among humans look like to dog - or perhaps, more apropos, what it smelt and felt like?

seeing nature at monterey bay aquarium II

Everything is illuminated...

seeing nature at monterey bay aquarium

eyes that have looked at jim crow

In the timeless traditions of the internet, I stumbled upon a wonderful digital collection of early 20th-century African American photography at the august institution where I work (see credits below - also see this related post on historical photos of Chinese dogs). The website doesn't provide too much information about the photographer, Michael Francis Blake - only that he opened the first one of the first black photo studios in Charleston, South Carolina. Which, of course, is saying quite bit. {Corrected & updated: 1:12am, June 17, 2009}

I was delighted to see that two of the ~170 photos in the collection feature dogs. I love the shadow of the photographer (?) in this one:

The vast majority of the images of the collection are posed portraits, studio or outdoors. Without exception, Blake's clients were impeccably dressed for the occasion. This is a beautiful image that makes me almost want to cry: the elegance of the women, the sweet openness of the boy's face, the alertness of the little dog.

In these images, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, we are looking at eyes that have looked at Jim Crow. Or, in the case of the unidentified woman below, stared back and perhap even glared at it at choice moments. This is my favorite dogless photo in the lot. I just love the tilting of the chair, the insousiance of the gesture.

Image credits (from top): "snapshot, dog lying down, unidentified," "Seated elderly woman holding a small dog, standing child and two standing women, unidentified," "Standing woman outdoors, unidentified" from Michael Francis Blake Photographs, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.