Description
For around 30,000 years, dogs have been closer to us than any other animal thanks to their distinctive social behaviour and high willingness to cooperate. At times, Burkard felt as if it was not humans who tamed dogs, but dogs who domesticated humans – and both became mirrors of each other.
For the photographs in this book, he spent many summer days walking for miles along the dog beach in Sankt Peter-Ording, asking people to tell him about their love for their dogs. Then he asked their permission to take a photo. Having become a dog lover himself during the coronavirus pandemic, he captured portraits of the wonderfully relaxed, often revealing but also funny interactions between dog owners and their animals on the dog beach. For him, who as a photographer had often been confronted with the dark side of human interaction in his reportages, ‘these summer days by the sea with people and dogs were freestyle with the camera and sugar for the soul.’
After leaving school, Hans-Jürgen Burkard actually wanted to become a behavioural scientist, but then spent three winters working on sled dog farms in Canada and Alaska, documenting the sled dog races there as a young photojournalist. For GEO magazine, he travelled through East Africa with wolf researcher Eric Ziemen, tracing the domestication of the domestic dog. He accompanied other researchers in their work with wolves. Burkard then spent 50 years as a highly decorated photojournalist for the magazines GEO and STERN, mostly doing hard-hitting reports that had nothing to do with dogs. Now he has returned to his old passion and is exploring it through photography.
