Underwater Dogs

I’m a little late to this post, but it’s charming and hilarious enough to post anyway. Photographer Seth Casteel has created a great niche of shooting high-speed underwater photography of dogs, and their intense, wide-eyed, teeth-baring faces underwater show the complete commitment of their actions. It reminds me why I love dogs. Great work, Seth.

The story behind these photos is almost as good as the photos themselves. Casteel started out photographing dogs at animal shelters, trying to capture a little personality and charisma in his subjects so they’d have a better shot at adoption. During a pool session with a client’s dog who wouldn’t stop diving for a ball, he ducked his camera underwater almost on a whim — and found an entire hidden world of expression: bared teeth, wide startled eyes, wind-tunnel cheeks, ears streaming backward like flags. One of those early underwater shots, of a scrappy terrier mid-lunge, spread across the internet in 2011 and 2012 with the kind of speed that gets a photographer a book deal. That book, Underwater Dogs, was published by Little, Brown and Company later in 2012, became a New York Times bestseller, and turned an offbeat pool-session experiment into one of the most recognizable bodies of work in contemporary pet photography.

Part of what makes the series so irresistible is the honesty of it. There’s no styling, no props beyond a tennis ball or a chew toy, no coaxing a performance out of the subject — just a waterproof housing, natural light bouncing through a pool, and dogs being completely, gloriously themselves in a moment they don’t know is being documented. Underwater, a golden retriever’s velvet good manners disappear and something more ancient and delighted takes over.

Casteel has said the goal was never to make dogs look silly, but to catch a kind of pure, uncensored joy — and there’s real affection underneath the comedy. He’s remained an outspoken advocate for shelter dogs and pet adoption throughout his career, and it’s easy to see why: an expression this unguarded is hard not to fall for, bulldog jowls and all.

The book spawned sequels, including Underwater Puppies, and cemented Casteel’s reputation as one of the most recognizable names working in animal and nature photography today. But it’s this original run of images — raw, a little unhinged, completely without vanity — that still holds up more than a decade later.