Neal Slavin took this picture of pugs and their owners in 2005 for an advertising campaign. Born in Brooklyn, Slavin was a master of the group portrait at the time. His book When two or more come together first appeared in 1974 and featured bodybuilders and gravediggers, hotdog vendors and firefighters, a unique collective portrait of Americans (which he followed with British a few years later).
His calling came, he says, when he was looking through some family portraits and came across a picture of a Boy Scout troop. “Some were laughing, some were clowning, some were looking serious into the camera lens, but all of them radiated an extraordinary humanity, a unique individuality. I wondered what happened to each boy after that photo was taken.”
Slavin is now 83. An updated 50th anniversary edition of If two or more … will be released later this year. Speaking to me recently from New York, he described how he likes his groups to find their own composition. “People assume I arrange everyone and then go back to the camera,” he said. “Actually, the opposite is true. When I photograph a group, I call myself half sociologist, half photographer. There are different hierarchies in every group. There’s always one guy with his chest puffed out and another who just wants to hide. I try to let them be themselves.”
The picture with the pugs was a typical example. “We had built a kind of staircase for the dogs,” he says. “And I decided that they should get the royal treatment with the red velvet curtains. But that didn’t really work. The owners were hidden behind the curtain with their dogs on leashes. But then it hit me. Why are we hiding them? I asked them to push the curtains aside. And there was the picture. After that it took five minutes.”
