JPG

Today my friend Steve Landeros, a fellow JPGmag artist who I've done some night shooting with in the past, found these big plastic dog heads in a bad, bad part of Treasure Island next to the government housing complexes... and upon hearing they were there, I immediately insisted that we go shoot pictures of them.

The night turned out to be as strange as these huge plastic wiener dog heads look...

As we were midway through getting our exposures figured out, a guy came up the street skating by with his two pitt bull dogs pulling him along... we figured he was training them for... sport (if you know what I mean)... Steve already was getting prepared to escape and was putting his equipment into the back of his truck... just in case... as the dood passed I gave him a friendly nod and he immediately stopped. The air kind of turned cold and he said "what?" there was a pregnant pause of silence and then I said, "oh we're just taking pictures of these strange doggy diner heads" and the guy sort of interrogated us for a couple of minutes to make sure we weren't someone who'd report him... or something like that. I guess we talked our way out of any trouble... or so it seemed as he and his dogs departed and vanished into the night... so we then proceeded to continue shooting.

Next thing you know, a man and a woman absolutely stoned completely out of their heads on something so strong that they were walking like zombies from Dawn of the Dead, stumbled straight over to us, citing in slurred speech just how stoned they were and then proceeded to beg us for a ride to their place in the projects... they would not take no for an answer...

...that's when Steve and I decided that the shoot was pretty much over. We quickly packed up and got out as fast as we could. The stoned couple tried to hang onto Steve's truck as he made his attempt to escape... finally they gave up and we both vacated the area with haste. The way things were suddenly going, we could tell it wasn't going to get any prettier.

Anyways, all that said... these heads were saved from destruction some years ago and are still owned by a one time association of mine named John Law, who was one of the originators of the Burning Man event that happens each year in Black Rock City in the Nevada Desert. These dog heads recently made a trip to New York's CBGB's before it shut its doors a couple of years ago, and have also been featured in many Zippy the Pinhead cartoon strips. These dog heads used to scare me silly when I was a young lad growing up in San Francisco... they sort of still do...

Note: I forgot to bring my remote along and so was only able to do a 30 second exposure... that being the case, I used my SB600 strobe to light up the dogs. No less than ten flashes were triggered to illuminate this object as I ran around it.