Dog Noir

Dun-dun-dunnnn! It’s dusk in Los Angeles. Palm trees against a cobalt sky. Horizon glowing like a cigarette’s lit end. You and your dog as restless as the hot, dry Santa Anas. You want to hit L.A.’s gritty streets to sniff up something new... I am a Los Angeles pet photographer who is always looking for something creative to do with my clients and their dogs and cats. I created Dog Noir in late 2018 with the idea that my subjects dress up in classic 1940s fashions and we photograph them with their pets in images that look as if they were stills pulled from a film noir movie. The expressions are very serious, as you might expect from its criminal roots, but the project is a humorous take on a beloved film genre. We've explored real Los Angeles film noir movie settings and we've mimicked them in other cases. One of the things I’ve really tried to do with the Dog Noir series is to include all ethnicities of people, all species of animals. In the past, film noir movies featured predominately Caucasian people with people of color relegated to villains or other stereotypes. In Dog Noir, they can be anyone they choose. And as far as people’s pets, we’ve photographed mostly dogs but also several birds and cats, including an owner who had seven lion-cut Persian cats at the Sowden House (the Lloyd Wright-designed house that has been suspected as being the scene of the infamous Black Dahlia murder). Some of the iconic Los Angeles locations we’ve used are the Culver Hotel, Angel’s Flight Railway, the Glendale train station, the “Double Indemnity” house, the bridge and walkway from “Touch of Evil,” the Eastern Columbia building, Chinatown, the Orange Empire Railway Museum, Boardner’s Bar, Pasadena City Hall, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the Hotel Normandie. I even took one set at downtown Los Angeles escape room that was done in a noir detective style and another set at an Asian antique furniture showroom. I have a huge list of locations I still want to photograph. All images were deliberately shot with a Fujifilm X-T3 and Profoto lights for style and consistency. Most of the outdoor photos have only one light, some of the indoor photos have two to four. The images were post-processed using Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro for black and white conversion and to add film grain. Dog Noir has been honored with a few awards and has been written about several times.