Rien de Personnel

Rien de Personnel – “Since 2013, I’ve been posting photos of dogs and representations of dogs on Instagram at an irregular but constant rate. These images, without intention or status, are taken and posted in the moment, without filter, without retouching, with the only interventions being the squaring and possible cropping. None of them have been posed or authorised, and they are almost always taken without anyone noticing.
They are not the result of any research, any search, any waiting, any re-use, they are not based on any collaboration, any watch, any subterfuge Dogs pass by, they happen, they are there, I photograph them, without showing myself, without approaching, without leaning, often without aiming.
The dogs are unidentified, most of them unknown to me. A few come back to me over the years. Humans only appear as silhouettes or fragments: a leg, a back, a hand holding a lead. The backgrounds are sometimes recognisable or locatable, sometimes not.
The ability of these little characters to evoke empathy as much as to express it touches me deeply. The sequence of our fleeting, unexpected and sometimes forgotten encounters is the diary of a decade. Nothing personal is ever revealed.” Martin Berthenod