This Dog Will Change Your Life

The Dog Zone is a phrase Friedman coined when he first started The Dogist. The Dog Zone is the space near the ground where the dogs Friedman photographs are sitting or standing. When he first started photographing dogs for his page, he was determined “to get down to the dog’s level,” to connect with the dog and to feature their world in his photos (74). Initially, Friedman limited his photos to the Dog Zone because he wanted images “that made it seem as though [the dogs] understood that [he] was the photographer and that they were the subject” (74). He was toying with The Sartorialist’s concept and translating it into his canine context. Over time, however, Friedman realized that remaining in the Dog Zone effectively eliminated the dogs’ owners from his photos. He started branching out of this space so he could include the owners in his photos and stories, too.

Puppies Behind Bars (PBB) is an organization based in New York and founded by Gloria Gilbert Stoga. PBB’s programming seeks to connect incarcerated individuals with dogs. After Stoga’s work with the Youth Empowerment Commission and UNICEF, she began working with inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility: “She wasn’t teaching them math or literature. She was teaching them to raise and train service dogs, often for police officers and soldiers who had been psychologically or physically wounded in the line of duty” (161). Stoga invited Friedman to help her run one of these sessions at Bedford. Friedman immediately noticed how important Stoga’s work with PBB was. The dogs not only went on to serve important roles in others’ lives, they transformed the incarcerated men training them as well. Predominantly, Friedman stresses how the dogs were helping the men reopen their hearts in ways that prison didn’t allow. This is just one of the organizations Friedman references to illustrate the symbiosis between humans and dogs.