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Michael Crouser: Dog Run

It started with a Great Dane.

Michael Crouser was walking through the Lake of the Isles Park in Minneapolis looking for a Great Dane to photograph.

"I had this idea of shooting a series of Great Danes," he said. "I wanted to get them in movement, show musculature and moving parts and shiny coats and bones.

"The pictures came out very differently than I had expected. The best picture came out showing something very monumentally goofy about this Great Dane, with legs and ears flopping everywhere, and his eyes and mouth wide open as he chased a ball across the park." Crouser went back to the park for more.

"I found no Great Danes, but I found huge crowds of other dogs in all manner of action, playing and fighting and chasing each other. I merely started photographing what I saw." That was the beginning of Dog Run, a book of 90 black-and-white photographs of all species of dogs in action, published in 2008 by Viking Studio.

Over a period of about two years Crouser shot almost exclusively at the Minneapolis park and at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of New York. "One of the things I noticed is these dogs behaved much differently in the company of other dogs than they did when they were with their human owners. I just felt like the dogs were so focused on each other and not on the ‘acceptable behavior' that their owners might expect of them on a walk around the lake or on a street."

Keen observation for a guy who doesn't really consider himself a dog person.

"We've only ever had one family dog," he said. "It's kind of funny. People would ask me, ‘What kind of dog do you have?' They would never ask me if I had a dog. It didn't really come from any special affinity for dogs as much as it did a curiosity about their shapes."

Crouser's previous animal study, Los Toros, which focused on bullfighting, also was shot in black and white. "I've always felt like what I can do with black and white feels more like my personal voice than does shooting and manipulating color," he said. "When I think about making photographs, I think about making black-and-white photographs."