Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983
The Lovers
By Sanford Schwartz
Man's Best Friend: Photographs and Drawings
by William Wegman, with an introduction by Laurence Wieder
Abrams, 64 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Wegman's World
by Lisa Lyons, by Kim Levin
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 80 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Man Ray, the Weimaraner who is the star of William Wegman's Man's Best Friend, has one of the most intelligent, alert, and handsome faces in the history of photography. If he were a man, he might be a leader, a hero; the mixture of gravity and self-possession in his face would make men willing to follow him anywhere. What he does, in these large color Polaroids, is, at least at first sight, simply a still-photography version of what the dogs in the dog acts did on the 'Ed Sullivan Show.' In these staged portraits, which occasionally include another dog or a person in the shot, Man Ray is an image of such self-contained attentiveness that he doesn't quite seem to be a dog. The difference between this Weimaraner and the seemingly boneless spaniel that slipped and slid over the glassy floor on the Sullivan show, all the while keeping a patient and droopy countenance, is that Man Ray isn't embarrassing. Like Buster Keaton, he may be permanently unarousable, but he never ceases to be potent. His virility, like the actor's, is always felt; it is right there under the surface.
Review, 3382 words
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