Photographer Pays a Touching Tribute to Her Elderly Dog

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When photographer Catherine Panebianco noticed her beloved dog Benny begin to show the signs of old age, she did what any photographer and dog lover might do: she picked up a camera. She began chronicling the last year of Benny’s life, photo by intimate photo.

The result was a series she titled Benny Was a Good Boy, made up of grainy, selective focus, black and white photos shot entirely on a smartphone. This might seem like a strange decision for a professional photographer to make, but Panebianco is convinced some of the immediacy and intimacy would have been lost if she had attempted this same task with a ‘real’ camera.

“I chose shooting this way to capture the intimate, special moments in our relationship,” she writes on her website. “Using a regular camera wouldn’t have felt as immediate and connected. The hazy, grainy, closed-in mood of the photographs in the series embodied what I was feeling at the time.”

Each photo is presented as a diptych, emphasizing the pair’s relationship, and at times painfully pointing out the sense of loss that Panebianco must have felt when Benny passed away.

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As Panebianco explains, in the end, these photos became so much more than a documentary project for her.

Benny Was a Good Boy began as a chronicle of my old dog’s final year but ended up being a way for me to deal with death,” she writes. “By photographing his slow decline, I dealt with the feelings that accompany the breaking of a connection that was so important in my life.”

To see more of her work, pay Panebianco a visit at her website or give her a follow on Instagram and Facebook.

(via Feature Shoot)


Image credits: All photos by Catherine Panebianco and used with permission.

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