I Didn't Come to Dogs Through Photography. I Came to Photography Through Dogs.

I was listening to a speaker recently when she said something that got me thinking.

Photography wasn't invented because we love taking photographs. Photography was invented because we love what we're photographing.

I set my phone down and just sat with that for a minute. Because in one sentence, she had articulated something I have felt in my bones for my entire career but never quite found the words for.

I came to photography through the back door.

I didn't grow up with a camera in my hand. I wasn't the kid documenting everything, thumbing through photo albums, dreaming about aperture and golden hour light. I was the kid lying on the floor with the dog. The one who pointed out every barn we passed on a road trip. The one who, at four years old, was given a weanling filly by her granddad and immediately understood that nothing — nothing — would ever be more important to her than that horse.

Her name was Ginger.

But I'll get back to her.

When it came time to think about a career, my path felt limited. I loved animals the way some people love oxygen — not as a preference, but as a requirement. I thought maybe I'd be a veterinarian. But as I got older I realized that wasn't the right fit for me, and when I looked around at other options, I couldn't find many that felt real. The world didn't seem to have a lot of room for people who just wanted to spend their lives in service to animals unless you were going to go to vet school. 

So I went to college, got a business degree, and kept working for a prom dress store turned marketing agency that produced a direct mail magazine for prom dresses.

Which is, I realize, an extremely specific sentence.

But it's where I learned to photograph. The owner (who is now my sister-in-law) was building something that stood apart from competitors by designing and photographing her own editorial spreads. I got to be part of designing those sets, thinking about light, figuring out how to photograph a dress in a way that made a teenage girl be able to see herself in it. Not just see the dress, but see herself wearing it. See herself becoming whoever she wanted to be on that night.

That idea, that a photograph isn't a record of a thing you see, but a doorway into an emotion, that's where it started for me.

Around the same time, I began fostering dogs.

And I started bringing my work home with me.

I started photographing my foster dogs the same way I thought about those prom dresses. Not just documenting what they looked like, but trying to show their personality in a way that made a stranger scrolling through a freshly minted Facebook rescue page stop and feel something. I wanted the photograph to say: take me home. I want to be yours. I wanted someone who had never met this dog to see the image and already feel the relationship they could have.

When I look back on that now, I realize I was already doing the work I still do today. I was just doing it in a rescue context before I understood it as a business.

The moment it clicked, when the creativity and the light and the thinking and the dogs all came together and I thought this could actually be a job, photography wasn't the revelation. The dogs were. They always were. Photography was just the medium I reached for because it was the best one I had found for saying what I needed to say about them.

I am always trying to get better at my craft.

I study light. I invest in equipment. I take workshops, I read, I push myself to understand more about the technical side of what I do than I understood the year before. I want to be a master of the craft — of lighting and composition and the particular skill of photographing animals who are, by nature, unconcerned with posing.

But here is the thing: I don't want that mastery for its own sake.

I want it so that it becomes muscle memory. So that when I am standing in front of your dog,  when they're doing that thing they do with their ears, or they've just spotted their favorite toy, or they're looking up at you with that specific look that you have never been able to explain to anyone who hasn't seen it, I'm not thinking about my settings. I'm not thinking about the light or the lens or any of the thousand tiny technical decisions that went into getting me to that moment.

I'm only thinking about your dog.

I'm only thinking about the love you have for your dog, the love I have for all the dogs.

That's the goal. Everything technical I have ever learned is in service of getting out of my own way so that nothing stands between me and what I'm actually here to photograph.

Ginger lived to be 32 years old.

My granddad gave her to me for my 4th birthday. She was eight months old. We grew up together. She was there for every awkward year of my childhood, every hard season of my twenties, every major thing that happened in my life for over three decades. I have been married for fifteen years, which means my relationship with my horse was still twice as long as my marriage, the longest relationship of my life. 

I wrote about what it meant to have photographs of her, and what it cost me emotionally to have almost waited too long to hire someone else to take them. But the short version is this: I understand from the inside what it means to love an animal for a lifetime. I understand what it means to look at a photograph and feel the weight of a whole relationship sitting inside one image.

I understand because I've lived it.

Lira was born in my hands.

Her mother had been surrendered to our rescue pregnant, and Lira came into the world with a pericardial hernia (her insides on the outside). I held her body together in my hands in the car on the way to the emergency vet for her first surgery at just 45 minutes old.

She picked me from the beginning. She would stop nursing and leave her mother to come find me. We went through more health challenges together in her nine and a half years than most people go through in a lifetime, and she expanded my heart in ways I didn't know were possible. She made me capable of emotions I don't think I had access to before her.

We're coming up on what would have been her tenth birthday on April 27.

I lost her last September.

I was already a photographer when Lira was born, so I have a photograph of her from the day she arrived. I have images of her from almost every single day of her life after that, some with my professional camera, thousands from my phone. More photographs than I could ever count.

And it is still really hard for me to accept that all of the photographs that will ever exist of her have already been taken.

There will be no new ones.

The archive is complete.

I tell you this not to make you sad, though I know it might, if you've loved a dog the way I loved Lira, but because I think it's important for you to understand who is on the other side of the camera when we meet to photograph your dog. I'm not a photographer who stumbled into dogs because it's a profitable niche. I'm a person who is living a life forever changed and shaped by these animals. Who understands, at a cellular level, what it means to love one. Who knows what it feels like to look at a photograph and be pulled back into the depth of a relationship that changed you.

That's who I bring to work every single time.

Here's what I want you to know about what I make.

When you look back at a really good memory: the best vacation you ever took, a holiday dinner, a moment you want to hold onto, your brain does something a little funny. It smooths out the rough edges. It keeps the golden edged parts. The stressful afternoon, the argument, the small thing that went wrong on day two, those fade. What remains is the feeling. The warmth. The best version of what was real.

That's what I want my photographs to feel like.

A photograph shouldn't make you remember the photo shoot. It should make you feel.

Not a record of the session. Not a souvenir of the afternoon we spent together. I want you to look at an image of your dog and feel like you're accessing the whole relationship, the ridiculous toy that was their absolute favorite, the way they looked at you when you came home, the version of yourself you were when you were with them. The love that was just ordinary Tuesday stuff that you were living without even realizing it.

Photography was invented because of what we love.

Not because someone woke up one day and thought it would be interesting to mess around with light and chemicals. Because someone wanted to hold onto a face. A place. A creature. A moment of being alive with something they loved.

That's why I'm here too.

Not because I love cameras — though I do love cameras. Not because I love the craft — though I love that too, and I will spend my whole career chasing a better version of it.

But because I love animals. Because I have loved them my whole life. Because I have a horse who lived to be 32 and a dog who was born in my hands and an entire life shaped by the relationships I have shared with creatures who couldn't speak but somehow said everything.

Photography is just the medium I found to tell the truth about that.

When you book a session with me, you're not hiring someone who will show up and take nice photos. You're hiring someone who will show up for your dog. Who will see them the way you see them. Who will work until she finds the image that, twenty years from now, will pull you straight back into the feeling of loving them.

That's the only thing I'm here to do.