Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
If you know me, you know that LSDL has been a passion project of mine for a while now. I came up with the idea long ago, but finally pulled the trigger to get it started in 2019. The idea was simple, use my dogstragam community as well as the network of people I know, and ask them if I can photograph their dog… while they’re sleeping. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
I surprisingly got little pushback — I mean, why would I, really? Who doesn’t want a picture of their dog? Reaching out to friends with dogs was fun… a way to reconnect with people that I had lost touch with and share this journey. It also forced me out of my comfort zone, asking strangers on the internet (gasp!) to allow me into their home and wait around until their pup decides to sleep. I wish I had more stories about how weird it was, but surprisingly, I don’t.
Hanging around in someone’s house with lights set up and a camera pointed at the dog’s preferred sleeping spot, I was able to capture so many sweet moments. And that’s all I wanted, really. Having taken no less than ten million photos of my own dogs sleeping, I knew I wasn’t the only one. And why isn’t their a sleeping dog coffee table book on the market already?? (Publishers — are you reading this?? I am the answer to this problem. Let’s publish my book.)
After a lot of momentum and photographing nearly 150 dogs in the span of less than a year, I was finally in a groove… but we all know what happened after 2019. And strangers weren’t too keen on the idea of me going into their home and photographing their dog while the world was in a lockdown and things seemed very uncertain, so I took a pause.
Unfortunately for me, I lost a lot of momentum and haven’t been able to find my way back on track yet. Although this is still something that is deeply important to me, I’d like to find the time and resources to see what getting a publisher looks like and finishing this book that so desperately deserves to see the light of day.
In the meantime, please enjoy a few of my favorites.
