2003

Dog-walkers walking six, seven, eight dogs at once – leashes fanning out like wheel spokes from the walker – was a quintessential New York City scene back then. At the time, my friend Rachel was teaching English as a second language and her boss Nancy owned the fabulous big white fluffy dog seen in the photo. Rachel arranged for me to borrow Nancy’s dog for the shoot.

Dog walkers didn’t have any particular uniform, just regular street clothes, so I wore the winter jacket and hat I was wearing at the time. I bought a blue quilted dog jacket and some white yarn and hand-stitched the Happy Holidays on to the jacket. It was taking me longer to stitch than expected and I had some out of town friends in for the holidays who I was supposed to meet up with, so I took the show on the road. I brought the dog jacket and white yarn and needle to the Soho Grand hotel bar and while my friends sipped cocktails, I stitched and finished the jacket.

The next day, I met up with Nancy’s dog walker on the upper east side and followed him around as he picked up different dogs – so we had his whole bunch of dogs, including Nancy’s. He also walked with a second dog walker and we met up with him – that way I’d have even more dogs. I have a habit of being late. Geoff had a habit of being even later than me (imagine that!?). So I’m walking along with these packs of dogs as they actually get walked – over to 5th Avenue, into Central Park, back out again - all the while waiting for Geoff to meet us with his camera so he can take the photo. Cell phones were still somewhat rare – I had a Motorola flip phone, Geoff didn’t yet have a cell phone at all. So meeting up as we were moving around was not easy. I would stop at pay phones and call him to tell him where we were as we moved around. As time went on without Geoff there, many of the dogs were done being walked and had to be returned to their homes and so by the time Geoff met up with us, these four dogs remained. We ultimately shot this around Park Avenue in the 90s.