The photographer Martin Usborne believes the urgent idea to photograph dogs in cars came from a buried childhood memory. Aged three or four, he was left in a car in a supermarket car park; not for long, maybe a few minutes, but long enough to wonder if his parents might not come back. The feeling never left him: “In a child’s mind, it is possible to be alone for ever.”
Somehow, in his subconscious, that feeling of potential abandonment attached itself to animals. He was disturbed by the way humans might silence or confine animals, in zoos or on farms, even at home. Years later, he wanted to find a harmless way of photographing that feeling.
How to do it? First, he wandered around his neighbourhood in east London looking for cars with a bit of cinematic glamour, then he left a note on the windscreen saying: “Can I photograph your car and put a dog in it?” To get the dogs, he sidled up to their owners in parks and asked them if he could put their dog in a car at night and photograph it in the name of art. He was astonished that most said yes.
His new book contains nearly 50 of these set-ups. There are dalmatians in the back of Citroëns and jack russells in ice-cream vans; Prospero, pictured here, weighs up his options in the driver’s seat. Usborne had imagined the pictures would share a kind of noir-ish dread to match his infant fears. Some did, but in others the dogs relaxed or just settled down to nap. The variety of response adds to the sense of strangeness. As that other Prospero once observed: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
• This article was amended on 2 March 2020 to remove a detail.
The Silence of Dogs in Cars by Martin Usborne is out on 12 March (Hoxton Mini Press, £12.95)
