Portraits Of Dogs By Tim Flach

Flach's work has increasingly focused on animals, ranging widely across species but united by a distinctive style that is derived from his concerns with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Among the subjects are monkeys, horses, bats, turkeys, parrots, Chinese pigs, dogs, frogs, fish and chameleons. “I shoot bats, embryos and flies on shit. I’m fascinated by how we interpret and humanize images of animals.” His images have been described as a system for thinking constructed and questioned by animal imagery: "Nobel Prize-winner author Elias Canetti penned an aphorism that could easily be applied to Flach – a person who 'thinks in animals as others think in concepts'."
Flach’s often abstract photographic style has been described as “the perfect antithesis to anthropomorphism”. "Flach employs the artistic technique of defamiliarization in many of his studio portraits, creating deliberately ambiguous close-ups, which present the subject at unusual angles in order to provoke questions from the viewer." “He may depict a horse against a monumental landscape, or create a close-up image of part of the animal so that it challenges our perspective and forces us to reconsider and question for ourselves why we react in a specific way to what we are seeing."