Cats & Dogs

Pets were hard to photograph. In the early decades of the camera, a sitter had to keep still for several seconds, and dogs and cats had no interest in the project. Many early animal portraits show a blurry tail, a turned head or a pet held firmly in a child's lap.

The change in how people saw animals came in the 19th century. Dogs had always been working animals, guarding farms, herding stock, pulling small carts and hunting. During the Victorian era they also became members of the family, and breeding for looks became a hobby. The first Westminster Kennel Club show was held in New York in 1877, and dog shows became a fashionable event.

Dogs far outnumber cats in this collection, and that is typical of the archive. Dogs went out in public with their owners, rode on fire engines, marched in parades and sat with soldiers in camp, so they ended up in front of the camera much more often. Cats mostly stayed home.

Some dogs became famous in their own right. A painting of a terrier named Nipper listening to a gramophone became the trademark of the Victor Talking Machine Company, under the slogan His Master's Voice. In Washington, photographers followed the White House dogs closely. Warren Harding's Airedale, Laddie Boy, was photographed so often in the 1920s that he became a celebrity, and Franklin Roosevelt's Scottish terrier Fala went nearly everywhere the president did.

Cats have their own small place. They appear in barns and kitchens, in children's portraits and, increasingly toward 1900, in the sentimental prints and postcards that showed kittens dressed up and doing human things. Worth noticing in all of these pictures is the people. A photograph of a family pet usually tells you as much about the family as about the animal, from the porch they sat on to the clothes they wore. And look for the dogs in the background of street scenes. Nobody posed them, and they are often the most natural thing in the picture.