Andrew Fladeboe‘s series The Shepherd’s Realm is the product of extensive international travel. He has journeyed from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Scotland, Norway and now, New Zealand, to create striking portraits of working dog breeds. Inspired by the tradition of British animal portraiture, his images reference the 18th-century paintings of George Stubbs and the 19th-century canvasses of Edwin Landseer.
“I’ve always loved animals. I have a sincere reverence of the natural world; to me animals are proof of something greater. I have been working with animals for much of the past 10 years in my photography. My interest in dogs came from my desire to focus on one type of animal and learn as much as I could about it. Dogs were a natural fit because they are a universal part of human culture and can be found in almost every society in the world.
The more I researched dogs the more I fell in love with them and their story. Dogs have been utilized for an amazing range of jobs since they were domesticated roughly 30,000 years ago. They truly are the noble beast of the animal kingdom and have been by our side since we made that initial pact. It’s my interest in working dogs that has lead me to my year in New Zealand photographing dogs. New Zealand is a culture where dogs serve such an incredibly important and integral economic, cultural, and historical role.”
Fladeboe’s work has been called romantic and heroic, but that is a simplistic reading of his portraits. As he points out: “ The camera is also an instrument of science and facts. I want to illustrate these animals in the way they truly are. The work merges Realism with Romanticism. Romantic Realism is an oxymoron of sorts; realism was a direct response against romanticism during the Victorian era. In essence the dichotomy is analogous to the shift in attitudes of the Victorian era – the pursuit of the wondrous beauty of nature comingling with the scientific exploits to document and understand it. My work inhabits the realm between the accurate portrayal of nature and the emotional qualities of it.
By linking realism to romanticism, it’s my way of showing that the world is a wonderfully emotional place full of these great noble creatures. Yet these dogs are not from tall tales. They are very real. Wonder and awe are legitimate feelings in art. Shiller argues that the goal of Romanticism is, ‘to abandon “the possibility of explaining Nature” that we take “incomprehensibility itself as a principle of judgment.’ My photographs try to examine the real lives of working dogs while appreciating the incomprehensibility and awe that these heroic animals engender. In doing so, we might understand our relation to other animals and nature, and learn to take care of them a little better.” Fladeboe’s pictures have been featured in publications including American Photography, The Vice Photo Book and the forthcoming publication Identities Now: Contemporary Portrait Photography.
Fladeboe is a graduate of the prestigious RISD art school and was awarded a 2014 Fulbright Grant for Photography in New Zealand. His pictures have been featured in American Photography, The Vice Photo Book and the forthcoming publication Identities Now: Contemporary Portrait Photography. National Geographic recently published a selection of his work, and in 2015 a volume of his pictures of working dogs in New Zealand will be published by Craig Potton. He has exhibited widely; his photographs have been included in group shows in New York, Boston, Seattle, and Philadelphia, among other places; he had a solo exhibition in Newport, Rhode Island, and this past year in Christchurch, New Zealand. In October 2015 he will have a large-scale solo exhibition in New York.
