The magazine of the photo-essay
November 2016 issue
by Thomas Roma and Giancarlo Roma
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
For over two years, photographer Thomas Roma mounted his camera
on an 8-foot pole and projected it out and over the dogs at a dusty
Brooklyn dog run in order to photograph their shadows. Plato’s Dogs is
simultaneously foreign and familiar in its depiction of its subjects. On
one hand, the dogs look little like themselves in the pictures, distorted
and featureless in their silhouettes. But on the other, they appear truer to
their essential self, their primitive substance and oddly - given the
misleading nature of the shadow in Plato’s cave allegory - closer to
their Platonic form. Looking through the pictures, one shadow wilder than
the next, it’s hard not to come to view the canines' shade as their spirit -
an outward projection of how they see themselves for those precious
hours when they’re off the leash at the park, self-actualizing. (Notably, in
their obscured rendering, their collars disappear.) Some resemble
fearsome wolves, some stoic water buffalo, and some a new breed of
creature altogether, but never a pet, never the animal that will later sleep
at the foot of your bed.
