Portraiture Shortlist

For around 30,000 years, dogs have been closer to mankind than any other animal. For the photographer of this series, it sometimes seemed that it was not humans who tamed dogs, but dogs who domesticated humans — and both became mirrors of the other. Dog Beach consists of portraits of dogs and their humans, taken at the North Sea coast in Germany. To create his portraits, the photographer asked his human subjects to tell him about their ‘love for dogs’ and then photographed them and their often revealing and humorous interactions with their canine companions.