Between Truth and Beauty
How end-of-life-pet photography sessions taught me to embrace emotion
I’ve been caught between loving beauty and loving truth. Truth isn’t always pretty; beauty isn’t always honest. It’s finding the intersection that calls to me. I love photography and I love journalism. So I put them together.
In my view, photography = beauty, journalism = truth. Ideally, for me. It can be an uneasy marriage.
It already has a name, photojournalism, of course. I majored in it in college. But now I’m using a photojournalistic approach in a very specific way in my work, pet photography.
You might have seen photojournalistic-style wedding photography. Or family photography in a documentary style. Casual, natural, emotional, often in black and white. I don’t do those, I do end-of-life sessions for pets.
I get the call, sometimes as people are leaving their vet’s office, that their dog or cat, their most cherished pet, has a terminal illness. Whether the prognosis is for weeks or days, the owner* is on notice: the day is coming and no day is guaranteed. They need a session, stat.
I’ve been a pet photographer since 2013 and, by both objective and subjective standards, I have developed skills. I’ve also changed how I view things. And now that I see things differently, it’s like I’m a beginner again.
But where beginners don’t know technical things yet, I know them. And all the rules that I learned, I broke them, then put them back together again. Photographic kintsugi.
You know kintsugi, right? The Japanese art of putting broken pottery back together, fusing the pieces together with gold. More beautiful, or different, for acknowledging the flaws and scars so openly. And so my photography has become a bit wonky and a bit wobbly because they are skills I’m using in a new way to me — the beginner again — but they are beautiful for the truth they tell. It’s mostly disregarding the emphasis on the technical things — focus, exposure, lighting — and the perfection of a pose, in service of the emotion, high and low, however it appears in front of my lens. That’s the gold.
If I’m known for anything, it is my studio work where I pay attention to the posing and technical aspects so much more. Not with these. Often the pet is very old or ill and I don’t want to tax them in the least by setting up backdrops and lights. It generally isn’t the kind of portrait you want on your wall, either, especially if their age or illness is very evident.
So I approach my end-of-life sessions in a photojournalistic style for the truth and beauty. I want to honor the relationship for the day we are at. And it’s often sad, truth be told. An inevitability hangs in the air. But it represents a certain totality of the relationship.
For some of these “rainbow bridge” sessions early on I used to think, oh, why did you wait so long to get professional photography, when your pet looked great? Before they were blind or in diapers? That’s harsh, I don’t think that way anymore. It takes what it takes and now I simply want to show the love.
I always tell my clients to just love their baby girl or their good boy. Feel what you feel. There will be both laughs and tears. I am documenting the moment. You will have this tiniest slice of your relationship with your beloved creature for the rest of your life. But do understand, that it is the tiniest slice.
Your memories are the whole thing, not a few hours of this day. But photojournalism is news, not always a feel-good feature story so it’s spontaneous, emotional, spare, maybe technically imperfect, funny and bittersweet.
But it’s your love at that moment. The truth and the beauty.
*when I say “owner,” my concept is caretaker as I don’t believe one life form can own another. Owner is always a troubling term to me — even when I say I’m the owner of two cats.
