Jennifer Cawley is in her element when photographing dogs. You can see the joy on her face and feel the love in her heart as she works with her four-legged clients. Sure, she’s shot Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello and Jane Seymour, but combining dogs and photography is the perfect mix for Cawley, who says, ‘Portraiture has always been my passion.’ I visited Cawley at her Pacific Palisades studio, bringing along the day’s model, 6-year-old Chloe Sunshine Rosenthal, a Pembroke Welsh corgi of stunning beauty. The set was draped with the Union Jack, a nod to Chloe’s ancestry, and the lights were set up and ready to go. Despite Chloe’s pleasant disposition, I was doubtful that she would sit still long enough for Cawley to get good shots; however, Cawley is a professional and knew what to do. A bag of dog treats didn’t hurt. ’My Aunt Donna and mother owned a pet shop together in Chicago for 30 years, so I grew up in a pet shop,’ says Cawley, who from a young age helped out at the store and walked and nurtured the dogs. Her love of photography also started early. ‘I was always going to be a photographer because my Aunt Donna was a photographer; I grew up in a darkroom, loving it. My parents gave me a Pentax for my 16th birthday. It was my first camera of my very own. I absolutely loved it, but it got stolen when I was 18. And then I switched to Nikon from there. I’ve always been a Nikon girl.’ A 1989 graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cawley’s career began in London, where she assisted advertising and celebrity portraiture photographers for about two years before heading out on her own. ’Celebrity portraiture was always sort of my main thing,’ Cawley says. She worked for a lot of magazines that focused primarily on television and music. ‘When digital came out I loved it and got into it right away. I was definitely one of the first people shooting digital in London, so I picked up a lot of work just because technically I was a little bit ahead of the times.’ Thanks to her digital skills, many of the top fashion houses in England began recruiting Cawley, including Ted Baker, Laura Ashley and Marks and Spencer, for whom she shot bathing suits for 10 years. These kinds of jobs were ‘always bread and butter, but portraits were always what I loved,’ she says. Companies took to digital because it saved them a lot of money. ‘It was never harder with film’it was just more expensive.’ Her now husband Will lived in London and is what drew Cawley there in the first place. ‘I grew up in Chicago and I actually met him on a beach in Jamaica. We fell in love within 24 hours. This was pre-e-mail, so we wrote letters for about six months.’ When Cawley graduated from the Art Institute, her plan was to travel, but she never really got past London, where she decided to stay and begin her career. They married in 1991. While in London, Cawley began photographing dogs for fun during her limited free time, by painting a 4-by-8 ft. wall blue outside their house and grabbing strangers walking their dogs. ‘Whenever I had a morning off or some time on the weekend I would sit with my coffee and wait for somebody interesting to walk by with their dog,’ Cawley says. ‘I had my lights and everything set up. I’d grab them and put them in front of this blue wall. I have a whole series of Clapham Common Dogwalkers.’ Cawley marveled at the relationships between people and their dogs, and how they often resembled one another. The Cawleys moved to Los Angeles in 2007 to begin their various business ventures’Yogamatic (custom yoga mats), Shortomatic (custom board shorts) and now Kinimatic (custom bikinis), which launched this week. Along with 12-year-old Finn, a sixth grader at Paul Revere, and 11-year-old Nina, a fifth grader at Marquez, they settled in the El Medio bluffs neighborhood. The Palisades was a good fit because they wanted to be near the ocean and learn to surf. Despite the success of her businesses (last year, on national television, Jennifer Aniston presented Oprah with a custom-made Yogamatic mat featuring the talk show maven’s dogs) and commercial photography, Cawley wanted to return to her true passion. Celia Bernstein’s poodles, Jeremy and Chad, sitting in their 1950’s-themed kitchen, caught Cawley’s eye when she was walking around the bluffs. She asked Bernstein if she could return for a photo shoot. ’When we took the pictures they were very surprised and anxious because we never ‘order’ them to sit in the booth’more often than not, we order them to get down or make room for the human family members,’ Bernstein says. ‘The dogs loved Jennifer. She is a true animal lover. I loved working with her and would do it again in a second.” Having been a photographer for over two decades, Cawley can compare and contrast life pre- and post-digital. In the old days, film would be dropped off at a lab for developing. Though more than capable in a darkroom, Cawley didn’t have enough time to shoot and develop her own pictures. There was a rhythm to shoots then: shoot, drop off the film at the lab, go eat, come back two hours later to view a preview, go have a drink, and finally come back and pick the film up at night. Digital photography changed all that. ‘The difference with digital is you go straight home and you look at everything online and you stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning rummaging through it,’ Cawley says. ‘It’s instant, but it’s still hours and hours of work that the lab used to do.’ Matt Powell and his family, including their 115-lb. mastiff Cali, live next door to Cawley. ‘We were taking photos of the family, but Cali our dog began to steal the show,’ Powell says. ‘The dog loved it. Before long, the kids left and Cali stayed there posing for about 25 minutes. It was fun and we got some amazing shots’of the dog.” Despite her love of dogs, Cawley’s household is currently without one. ‘Harley was our only dog,’ Cawley says, referring to their Jack Russell Terrier. ‘She was the light of our life, and our only child for some time. We did not bring her with us, as she was not well when we left London. So she spent the last year of her life with her best friend, my father-in-law Brian, having a cup of tea every morning on the south coast of England. She was 19 when she died.’ Back at Cawley’s studio, Chloe is still intrigued by the treats that Cawley’s son Finn is now feeding her. For the most part, Cawley finds it easier to work with dogs than children. At one sitting she may shoot upwards of 300 frames, even though she knows when she’s got the perfect shot, which often comes at the beginning of the session. ’I look a bit silly and I make all sorts of crazy noises. But I don’t mind looking silly,’ Those crazy noises helped in Chloe’s case, and she did look at Cawley, and thus the camera, enough times for the photographer to get a multitude of great shots. For more information on Jennifer Cawley’s dog photography, go to losangelesdogphotography.com.
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