There is a particular kind of nerve required to photograph Iggy Pop, or Amy Winehouse, or Sonic Youth mid-swagger, and Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit has it. For years, the Berlin-based artist made her name behind the camera in music, her portfolio a who’s-who of the people who defined the sound of a couple of decades: the Smashing Pumpkins, the Kills, the Cure. These days, though, the icons in front of her lens are more likely to have a wagging tail than a record deal.
Schneider-Matzigkeit’s ongoing series, Dogs of Berlin and Their Humans, turns her portraitist’s eye on the animals threaded through the city’s art and music scene, and the work has drawn notice well beyond the neighborhood, including a feature in Vogue Italia. The through-line from rock stars to rescue dogs isn’t as strange as it sounds. Both, in her hands, are studies in character, and both hinge on the same hard-won skill: getting a subject to relax enough to show you who they really are.
The muse was sleeping at her feet
The project began close to home, with her own dog, Bear, and the unusually tight bond between them. From there it grew into something more ambitious: a document of everyday people and their dogs, and the extraordinary relationship that runs between the two species. Most of the portraits are made in people’s homes, precisely because that’s where the co-existence is most honest, humans and dogs sharing space, routines, and couches across the city.
That framing is deliberate. Schneider-Matzigkeit has said she wanted to move away from the language of ownership altogether. In her view, dogs are sentient beings, equals in feeling, emotion, desire, and will, and every portrait aims to capture the individual character of the dog, not just a generic cute pet. It’s a philosophy that shows up in the images, which read less like stock photos and more like portraits of someone the photographer clearly respects.
What shooting dogs taught a rock photographer
The leap from musicians to dogs wasn’t a single jump. After relocating from London to Berlin, Schneider-Matzigkeit first spent years, roughly 2007 to 2015, photographing international female artists living in the city, much of it shot at her studio, Lux Revolver, and gathered into an art book, Berlin Reflections – Antlitz Berlin. When she went looking for a new challenge, dogs offered exactly that.
Her biggest lesson from the switch is one any pet owner can borrow. Meet the dog first. Let them get used to you. Remember that you are a guest in their environment, not the director of it. Be patient, take breaks, and, above all, keep treats on hand. Some dogs perform happily for the camera and some want nothing to do with it, which, she notes, is just as true of the human subjects. The whole craft comes down to waiting for the split-second when everyone in the frame is genuinely at ease, then catching it before it passes. It’s less like commanding a shoot and more like earning one.
A dog changes how a city feels
Bear, now eight, is a small mystery of a mix, Chihuahua, Spitz, and Schipperke among the prominent ingredients. As a puppy he looked so much like a bear cub the name was inevitable. They found each other in Berlin in November 2012, when he was an eight-week-old pup small enough to sit in one cupped hand. He has reshaped her daily life largely because he is almost always with her, part necessity (he has separation anxiety and hates being left alone) and part personality (he is adventurous and insists on coming along).
Luckily, Berlin obliges. The city is famously accommodating to dogs, welcome in cafés, bars, eateries, and beer gardens, and permitted on public transport, with plenty of shops and bakeries open to them as well. Schneider-Matzigkeit’s ideal day with Bear is a tour of the city’s green edges: a park like Volkspark am Weinberg in Mitte, the old water tower at Kollwitzplatz, a stroll around Museum Island, and out to the water. The region is spoiled for it, with something like 3,000 lakes across Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg, most of them dog-friendly, though Bear, for the record, prefers to wade only up to his belly.
The stories inside the frames
Ask her for a standout and she reaches for Zuko, a Spanish Greyhound rescued in Spain, fostered, then adopted by a couple named Peter and Julia. In his early days Zuko was a runner, bolting miles away and turning up tucked into gardens across the East German countryside, until he slowly grasped that this new family was, at last, a safe place to stay. It’s the kind of arc, fear giving way to trust, that Schneider-Matzigkeit’s whole project is built to notice, and it’s why the images land the way they do.
What comes through most in the work, she has said, is confirmation of how valuable the human-dog relationship really is. Watch the quiet, sometimes not-so-quiet, communication running between a person and their dog, and you can see the bond and the loyalty plainly. She hopes it comes through in the photographs, too. For a photographer who once made her living freezing rock stars in motion, it’s a gentler kind of intensity, but the goal is the same: to catch a true thing before it moves.
You can follow the series on Instagram at @dogsofberlinandtheirhumans.
