INTERVIEW
Kaylee Greer
Never work with animals, so the old saying goes – but Niall Hampton finds someone who didn’t get the memo…
Greer is a US-based but multi-international award-winning dog photographer.
Her images can be viewed in books, magazines and calendars, on products, packaging and greeting cards, and in advertising campaigns throughout the commercial pet industry.
Greer’s distinctive and colourful photographic style allows her to stand out from a crowded field, and is an aesthetic drawn directly from the inspiration that she finds inside the soul of a dog.
A passionate advocate of her craft, Greer shares her knowledge of dog photography with audiences around the world, both online and in person.
To deliver this, she has partnered with some of the best-known companies in the photography education space, including Canon, B&H Photo and KelbyOne.
www.dogbreath photography.com
Having delivered an engaging and very colourful Super Stage talk at The Photography Show last September, it would have been negligent of us not to have brought Kaylee Greer’s work to the wider Digital Camera audience. Judging by the length of the queue at her post-talk Dogtography book signing, it was clear that there is a lot of interest on this side of the pond in Greer’s work, which offers a distinctive aesthetic approach and strives to bring out the character and soul of her inevitably cute canine subjects.
Taking photos of a dog can be relatively straightforward, especially if it’s the family pet, but Greer’s work is next-level. To find out more about how she established, finessed and found an audience for her characterful captures, we caught up with Greer for a lesson in ‘dogtography’…
What first attracted you to photography?
Photography is like a magical superpower. It’s this surreal ability to freeze a moment, and I was always so drawn to the possibilities of that. Photography lets us immortalise a tiny slice of time, slide it in our pockets, and keep it by our hearts forever. Then, we can pull that image from our pocket at any time to look at when we need it most. Photography is persuasive. It can change narratives and rewrite the endings to stories. It can help humanity form entirely different opinions. It’s this beautiful and intoxicating process with limitless possibilities for how it can change and inspire, and that drew me in from the very first moment I understood the concept of what it was.