Image: Sophie Gamand Podcast Sophie Gamand is a French award winning photographer and animal advocate based in New York. Since 2010 her work has focused on dogs and our relationship with them, especially dogs in shelters. She is mostly known for her book Wet Dog and her series Flower Power, featuring shelter pit bulls wearing flower crowns. Sophie has revolutionized the way shelter dogs are photographed and promoted, offering a new image of homeless pets with glamorous, fun headshots. Through her popular social media platforms, Sophie gets lots of dogs into loving homes, including long timers who have been waiting for years. Find out more about Sophie Gamand’s work on her website. Follow Sophie’s popular Instagram for your daily dose of cute shelter dogs waiting for adoption. For more valuable information on her upcoming exhibit, you can follow her on Twitter and like her Facebook page. Image: Sophie Gamand Image: Sophie Gamand Image: Sophie Gamand Podcast Transcription Welcome to the doghipsters.com podcast, where we share amazing interviews and insights on the fun and fashionable doggie lifestyle. If you want the best for your furry friend then this is the place to receive current, expert, original, and organic info. Courtney: Hi this is Courtney from Dog Hipsters. I am here with Sophie Gamand. She is a French award winning photographer and animal advocate based in New York. She is mostly known for her book, Wet Dog, and Flower Power, which features sheltered pit bulls wearing flowered crowns. Hi Sophie! I am delighted to speak with you today. Sophie: Hi! Thank you so much for having me on the show. Courtney: Absolutely! When did you first feel that you had a passion for taking artistic photos of dogs? Sophie: My dog photography started in 2010 when I moved to New York from Europe and I was a little shy and my English was not perfect, so dogs became my way in socially to meet people and converse with strangers. Right from the beginning, I decided I was going to try and offer a new kind of art around dogs, a new kind of photography, and bring dogs into the art world. I felt like they had been left out. There are not a lot of artists who have really explored the depth of our relationship with dogs and dogs as a subject matter. I really wanted to do that and explore everything because dogs are so fascinating and they’ve been with us for so long. They are more than just animals. They are companions. I wanted to celebrate that and explore that and see what it means about us, humans, and the relationship we have with animals and our environment in general. Courtney: That’s amazing. I love how you found your passion. How do dogs reveal their true essence through their eyes? Sophie: Dogs are sentient beings so that means they are very close to humans in the sense that they have feelings and emotions. As a sentient being, of course their eyes are going to be very expressive. We always say the eyes are the windows to the soul and with dogs it is the same. It is very true. With my work, I became really focused on the gaze of the dogs and their faces. After a millennia of living with us, in close partnership with us, they have really developed human expressions almost to adapt to our language. The puppy eyes – we all know the puppy eyes – they really appeal to our nurturing nature and our motherly feelings. In my work I focus on the eyes a lot because to me that’s where the magic is. Courtney: Yes, I love that. I love the puppy eyes too! What do you think the Wet Dog book conveys about our role in the domestication of dogs? Sophie: The Wet Dog book that I made is basically a series of photos of dogs soaking wet taking a bath at the groomer. At first I was really fascinated by the whole grooming scene and how we impose all of these codes to dogs. A bath is a very unnatural state for them. As I photographed them in the bath, I realized how vulnerable they were at that moment and how much it revealed about our amazing unique relationship with dogs. It’s incredible that they just accept anything from us. Of course they have these pleading eyes, it’s like they’re begging their master or creator to protect them and get them out of the bath! There’s something so poignant and touching. It reveals a lot about our closeness to dogs and everything that we put them through. When you work for an animal rescue like I have for the last few years, one think you know, is when you pull the stray dog from the street to rescue the dog, the first think you do is bathe them to get rid of parasites and fleas and clean wounds. The bath, in that sense, is a right of passage. It’s almost like a baptism. You take a dog from a world of neglect and abuse and a horrible life and through the bath you bring them into a world of caring. So for me, celebrating bath time was also about that. Courtney: Yeah, I love that. That’s very interesting. How is the typically delicate symbol of flowers used in your series, Flower Power, to convey a powerful message? Sophie: My series, Flower Power, is about pit bulls from shelters. I build flower crowns and I bring them to shelters around the U.S. and I put flower crowns on pit bull’s heads at the shelter and I photograph them. The reason why I chose the flowers is because when you oppose fragile flowers to a “scary dog,” like the pit bull, you basically reverse completely the preconceived ideas that people might have and all of a sudden, instead of being this “scary dog,” the pit bull becomes almost like an old lady dog, like a little poodle wearing flowers. It allows for a new conversation around the dog. People suddenly are surprised and they can’t rely on their preconceived ideas anymore because this is a new image of the pit bull. It sparks conversation. The other aspect about using flowers is that just as in Baroque art in general, flowers are really here to remind us of the ephemeral quality of life. Through my series, flower power, I really want to convey the idea that all life is precious and fragile, including the life of pit bulls. Even if you don’t like pit bulls, you have to stand up for their lives because they matter and they’re important. Courtney: Yes, that’s a powerful message and I love how you are changing the preconceived notions through your photography. Sophie: Thank you. Courtney: As an animal advocate, how does your work assist animal shelters with adoption? Sophie: I believe that good photography leads to more adoptions. Not just because it promotes animals in the fresh and cool and appealing way, but also because as a whole, it gives a better image of shelters in general. For the past six years this has been one of my missions to basically educate shelters on the importance of good images. We are very far now from the old-fashioned shelter advertisement, when you had those shivering, sick, sad looking animals. Now days, shelter dogs should look sexy, in a way. It’s about creating a connection with adopters. The sad stories in the past worked, but now they don’t necessarily appeal to younger generations. They have unfortunately carried the idea that sheltered dogs were damaged goods and they were sick and they were dirty. My mission was to promote shelter dogs as dogs that were amazing, fun, full of personality, and they are clean and they are healthy and they are so ready to sit on your sofa and snuggle with you. It was time that we had a new approach to this and fun photos are really key. I have seen in the past six years that I have been doing this, I’ve seen a big change and more photographers are helping shelter animals now. It’s really creating a huge difference. Courtney: That’s incredible! I love how it is changing the way people see shelter dogs. Sophie: Yeah! Courtney: Can you tell us about your upcoming exhibit at Photoville and your new 2017 calendar? Sophie: Yes, so I am super excited about Photoville. It basically takes place in Brooklyn, New York on September 21st through September 25th. It is a big photo festival that’s really cool. The exhibits are organized in containers. I am going to have a whole container to exhibit my Flower Power series. This will be my first solo exhibit in the U.S. That is big that I am going to be able to share my flowered pit bulls from shelters to a big community of photography lovers and art lovers and people that are going to come to this event. It is free and it is really amazing. I am also going to organize my first adoption event there. Some of my flower models that are still looking for homes will come on Saturday the 24th to my exhibit and hopefully meet with their match. So, that’s really exciting! I am also going to release my new calendar during this event. I’ve been doing this calendar for three years. It’s been very helpful in funding the Flower Power project because I photograph dogs for free in shelters around the country. So far I have taken photos of about 300 pit bulls with flower crowns. It is a lot of work. It is a lot of time. There are travel expenses. The calendar basically helps me fund the project. It is always an exciting time when I have released a new calendar. My fans are very excited about this news too and everybody is in the starting blocks and they are waiting for their release. Courtney: That is great! Our listeners will be really excited to know about this too. Do you have an important message to share with our listeners? Sophie: From my point of view, the most important message would be to please consider adopting a dog from a shelter rather than purchasing one. I think that if we call ourselves a humane society, we need to own up to that title. I don’t think we can claim that title when we euthanize 1.2 million dogs every year in the American shelter system. The only way to reduce these numbers is for people to stop breeding and be more serious about spaying and neutering and educating people and promoting adoption. Next time you want to get a dog, go to your local shelter or rescue and find your match. There is no better feeling than this in the world. Courtney: Yes, thank you for that message, Sophie. Sophie: Thank you. Courtney: I appreciate you being here as well. Sophie: Thank you so much. Courtney: For those of you listening, you can find out more about Sophie Gamand’s work on her website, http://www.sophiegamand.com/. Follow her popular Instagram @sophiegamand for your daily dose of cute shelter dogs waiting for adoption. For more valuable information on her upcoming exhibit, you can follow her Twitter at sophiegamand and like her Facebook page. Thank you for being on today’s Dog Hipsters podcast. Please go to doghipsters.com and join us to continue receiving all of the benefits. Good day!
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