Bizarre or trending subjects? Catch a break with our curiosity of the week. British photographer Gerrard Gethings has produced playful portraits for the project Do You Look Like Your Dog ?
Gerrard Gethings lives and works in London. His assistant is Baxter, a nine-year-old Border Terrier. After his studies at the Beaux-Arts and ten years of work with the famous photographer Terry O’Neill, he decided to focus on photography. Especially, animal photography. In 2017, he began the Do You Look Like Your Dog project with British publishing house Laurence King. Together, they produced a set of cards from his images. For a year, he took portraits of dogs and collected them in a 50-card Memory Game published in 2018 and turned viral. “I have never met an animal with the slightest interest in photography,” the photographer tells us, aware of the difficulty of photographing animals.
A mutual influence
“We have all seen these strange couples in the park: An old man with an old grey dog. A bearded man with a schnauzer. Curly hair and a poodle
” he says. The similarities between a master and his dog could be much more common than one would suspect. Why do people look like their dogs? Is it a shared narcissistic trend? We are naturally attracted to what looks like us. The relationship with a dog also creates an intense bond of affection and sharing. A mutual influence that sometimes becomes a symbiosis. The game explores the attachments – physical but psychological as well – that we develop with our dogs. “I have been told that I do look like Baxter. We have the same hair colour and both sport a beard. We are also both laid back in our approach to life“ Gerrard Gethings tells us. Obviously, the similarity between master and dog is not just a legend. “Like master, like dog”: by watching this series, this saying has never been so accurate.
© Gerrard Gethings
