Plato’s Dogs

For over two years, photographer Thomas Roma mounted his camera on an 8 foot pole and projected it out and over the dogs at a dusty Brooklyn dog run in order to photograph their shadows.Plato’s Dogsis simultaneously foreign and familiar in its depiction of its subjects. On one hand, the dogs look little like themselves in the pictures, distorted and featureless in their silhouettes. But on the other, they appear truer to their essential self, their primitive substance and oddly-given the misleading nature of the shadow in Plato’s cave allegory-closer to their Platonic form. Looking through the pictures, one shadow wilder than the next, it’s hard not to come to view the canines’ shade as their spirit-an outward projection of how they see themselves for those precious hours when they’re off the leash at the park, self-actualizing. (Notably, in their obscured rendering, their collars disappear.) Some resemble fearsome wolves, some stoic water buffalo, and some a new breed of creature altogether, but never a pet, never the animal that will later sleep at the foot of your bed.