Forward

Introduction: Emerson Cooper

In a world where more than three billion images are posted online every day, you might wonder what possible importance this relatively small collection of 200+ nineteenth-century portrait photographs might have. Over the course of ten-plus years building this collection, I wondered this a few times myself. I have found it to be true that it is not always clear where one is going, or why, at the outset of building a collection.

Often beginning as an intuitive act, I believe it is highly probable that many collectors begin building collections without really understanding any possible underlying meaning, significance, or patterns. It is only later when the collection begins to take shape that the collector looks upon it and sees a reflection on many things, possibly including their own self.

For me, such insights began to happen several years ago after I was lucky enough to visit the studio and massive photography collection of Dr. Stanley Burns here in New York City. I had numerous “aha” moments that day. Perhaps the most significant was seeing several books in progress in his studio using miniature printed versions of each image.

It was such a simple thing, but it stuck with me. Seeing the photos posted up on a board all together in one place in a way that they could be viewed as a whole helped me understand not only the potential of my own collection, but a way forward for this book.

Subsequently, in my small studio, there was such an assembly of tiny images up for a prolonged period of time as the collection seen in this book slowly grew. Much was considered and learned by gazing upon that assembled whole as a work in progress.

It seems clear that out of the millions of cabinet-card photos made during the thirty-plus-year period between 1866 to 1900, a small fraction of the photos were portraits of boys with their dogs. Unfortunately, many of the images seen in this book (found in flea markets and elsewhere) long ago became detached from their identities, families, and stories.

Scouring the NYC fleas as part of my Saturday-in-the-city routine, I understood these images had gotten lost in the big world. It was during that gathering time that it occurred to me there was a sense of togetherness brewing as the collection grew. The now-found images were arriving in a new, imaginary close-knit community and were no longer lost. That’s the way I thought about it during the gathering period. :-)

As this part of the story suggests, entangled in the mix of any collection is always what the collector has experienced and is experiencing in their own life.

In the last few years as I have gotten older, I have begun to notice what could best be expressed as “time.” In my early life I had not paid much attention to it, but then all of a sudden grasping time—and how much had passed—began to pop into my mind on a regular basis.

I began to see that time and the passing of it was deeply embedded in this collection. All else that we see in it is built on that underlying foundation. This is a book about time passing as much as it is about boys and dogs.

A collection like this contains many emotional images in which there is an understanding on the viewer’s part that the subjects captured in the photos— the boys and dogs—are all long gone. Likewise, many things seen in the timeline that occurred in the boys’ lifetimes are gone, while some remain in constantly evolving states. For me, that long-gone dynamic creates a specific type of energy in the photos that is difficult to describe in words.

Truth be told, I’m not sure I can fully convey here the many connecting levels that I found and made across the collection. Some are very personal. Some took me a long time to figure out. The mind, it seems, works in complex, nonlinear ways.

Of course, when working on a book, the overarching connections are always somewhere in one’s thoughts. As the book begins to take form and you embark on that creative journey, you stumble upon ideas, read things, and make connections along the way.

One day, I saw a story in the news about a man who made it his hobby to visit a nearby graveyard to clean the older stones after he noticed that most of the folks buried there are forgotten after several generations had passed. The notion that many of us will eventually be forgotten a few generations from now stuck with me, although I really did not know what to do with it at the time. I collected up that notion.

Another day, months later, I found a postcard in a box. It read: “It is here only for a short time and then it is gone.” That fragment of thought likewise stuck with me.

Just this week, an old friend sent me an article describing a man who took his beloved dog on a retreat in the final days of the dog’s life. Again, this snippet embedded itself in my consciousness.

For me, portrait photography has a sacred kind of presence. As far as I know, none of the boys or dogs seen in this book were famous, but to me this does not diminish their power. It is no secret that some of the photographers had great skill, while others not so much. Regardless, in these photos we see the boys as individuals, most often standing, accompanied by, sometimes holding onto, their beloved animal friends.

I began to see that that time and the passing of it was deeply embedded in this collection.