Animal Personification

Today I was intrigued by the concept of animal personification, or that thing where we see an animal with human traits, or a human with animal traits.  I’m sure most photographers are aware of William Wegman’s dogs or the painting of dogs playing poker.  There is also the brave people who have their faces tattooed to resemble a lion. This and my interest in self portraits set me thinking.

We have a vintage wolf mask that I considered putting on our small dog. But that would not be new at all, and certainly not fit my needs for the self to be included.  To believe in an amorphous change I think you need a new persona to appear on the combined creature, that is not one or the other, but something else altogether.

It took a little while to eliminate all the shots that didn’t start off with that right look.   Post processing helped the transformation by the elimination of color, vignetting, and the addition of detail via layer masks.  As for a self portrait, I rarely have seen this entity, but the need to have others believe it exists, is an intriguing mystery for me.