I would have broken up with Girlfriend a long time ago if it weren’t for one thing: my wife and daughter love her. Our relationship has never been quite what I’d hoped. Sure, she’s beautiful and athletic, but we’re just not comfortable with each other. I think she’s too loud, and she seems to think I’m a bad guy because sometimes I need a little more space than she does.
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“Dogs are easy to capture on film,” Sutton says. “They’re natural and comfortable and they’re auditory–they react in really funny ways to sounds you make for them. And they’ll do anything you want for a piece of freeze-dried beef liver.” People aren’t always so easy (just look at your driver’s license). Put them with their pets, though, and “everyone is more comfortable and playful,” Sutton says.
“It’s probably very hard to photograph animals because there are so many unknowns–you can’t tell them to look a little bit to the left,” says Stuart Clarke, a veterinarian at Lincolnshire Animal Hospital who had Sutton shoot his dog, his cat, and his two children last year. “You have to trick them into doing what you want or wait for them to do it on their own. If you’ve ever taken pictures at a wedding, you know how painful it is to get people looking right. But David has a way of communicating with the animals so he can get really good pictures.”
What’s outside the box of some Sutton photos is the human subject. His preference isn’t usually the standard dual portrait, with both subjects facing the camera. The person in his shots might show up only as a pair of arms or legs, or the person’s face might be partially obscured by the dog’s outstretched ears.
But things only clicked when Sutton got his own dog, Zane!, an exuberant border collie-Australian cattle dog mix whose personality cried out for a name with an exclamation point. When Zane! was enrolled in an obedience class in Riverwoods, Sutton showed some pictures he’d taken of the dog to his instructor, who told him he ought to go into the dog photography business–then as now an almost nonexistent field.
Seconds after Girlfriend wiggled over to meet him, he took the same attitude toward her that dozens of other people have: What a sweet, friendly dog! What’s wrong with you that you can’t love her? That’s OK. I’m used to it. If Tolstoy had written about Anna Karenina’s dogs, he would have said, “All happy pet owners are happy in the same way. All unhappy pet owners have a litany of pooped-on rugs, midnight barking, and muddy paws on the couch they’re not telling you about.”
