The Globe and Mail Pet Photography

I am tickled to be included in The Globe and Mail‘s article on the business of pet photography and pet photographers in Toronto. A big thank you, Lisan Jutras, for writing this piece. Thank you, Shelley Laamanen, for contributing and to Arantxa Cedillo for allowing me to be on the other side of the lens for a change. I love the photos you took of me in action. And thank you, Tichka and Stanley (in the basket – not Cameron), for being wonderful models.

 

Fluffy’s Ready For His Close-up – Article dated: March 11, 2008

By Lisan Jutras

Photographed by Arantxa Cedillo

Toronto Pet Photogapher

 

 

ARTICLE TEXT

Portrait artists charge as much as $1,400 a sitting for photo sessions that focus on immortalizing someone’s beloved pet.
When Shelley Laamanen’s guinea pig, Oreo, started getting on in years, Ms. Laamanen thought it would be nice to have something to remember him by, but mere snapshots wouldn’t do.

“Being all black, and my dog Nemo is all black, getting pictures of them, for me – to get the details – was more difficult.” So Ms. Laamanen went to the professionals. She called Marcia Leeder, a Toronto photographer who specializes in pet portraiture. Ms. Leeder posed Oreo on some flagstones, in some shots eating a strawberry, in others with a dandelion.

When the session was through, Ms. Leeder not only gave Ms. Laamanen the prints of her choosing, but also CDs of a selection of the photos set to music (Sinatra’s Young at Heart for Oreo; Moments to Remember, a Manilow tune, for Nemo.) “It was the best thing that I did,” says Ms. Laamanen – Oreo passed on not long after. “It’s such a wonderful keepsake.”

Ms. Leeder began photographing dogs professionally in 2005, inspired by her own “little dirty puppy,” Tichka, a rescue adopted from Morocco that quickly became her muse.
Although she used to work in film, the demand for pet portraits was high enough that she was able to switch to pet photography as a full-time gig in 2007. She charges $300 for a “sitting,” although not much sitting is actually involved.

“I don’t sit the dog and make them cock the head and then take the photo,” she says. “I kind of follow them around and wait for them to give me eye contact.”
Heidi Zutter of K9 Phodography in Vancouver, started doing dog portraits six years ago.

“At the time when I started, there were, as far as I know, only two other [pet] photographers in Vancouver that were actually getting work. … But since I started doing it I have seen so many dog photographers pop up,” she says. “Every time I’m at the pet store I see a handful of other names and cards.”

A flip through the pages of Modern Dog or high-end Bark magazine reveals dozens of advertisements for pet photographers and painters in a range of styles.
But surely the queen of the castle is Amanda Jones, a Massachusetts-based photographer who has been called both the Annie Leibovitz and the Richard Avedon of pet photographers. From her home in North Adams, she flies across the United States, hitting about 20 cities a year to do pet portraits.

After a 2005 profile of Ms. Jones appeared in the New York Times, says the photographer, “we got a few celebrity clients,” including Mary Tyler Moore and Danielle Steel, and Ms. Jones’s schedule filled up “for two years straight.”
She now charges $1,400 for a session, which lasts an hour and a half.

“It’s just a huge industry,” says Julie Glick, a Toronto-based painter who kicked off her career as a dog-portrait painter with a show of neighbourhood dogs in her local gallery. She has done about 15 paintings of dogs, starting at $400. “It’s really indicative of how our relationship with pets has changed.”

Ms. Laamanen concurs. “They’re my family,” she says of her creatures. “And for me, that’s why pet photography is like photography for my family: Why would I not do it?”
“Even though we look at pet portraiture as sometimes kind of kitsch, or, ‘It’s too cute, you’ve got a picture of Foo Foo up there,’ it can be so much more substantial than that. They’re poignant, beautiful creatures,” Ms. Glick says. “Dogs are a metaphor for the plight of mankind, if that’s not too grand a statement.”

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