Impressed by the companionship between Milo the dog of Stanley Ipkiss in Hollywood film "The Mask", photographer Siya Singh Akoi travelled around India for four months, visiting dog shows and taking portraits of pets with their owners or handlers.
"Dogs have become a commercial commodity now and the idea of a dog as a part of the family has gone out the window. The more I began to look at the canine commerce, the more interested I became and in 2009 I started to explore dog shows across the country with my camera," says Akoi.
The photographer visited 12 cities from Chandigarh to Chennai clicking at least 3,000 photographs of canines with their owners. At an exhibition,"The Dog Show Project", which began on October 14 at the India Habitat Centre's Visual Arts Gallery, 40 of those photographs are being showcased.
"I traveled to 12 cities starting with Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Dehradun, Lucknow and Mohali. I was disturbed by the lack of regulation in dog breeding and handling which was starkly visible," Akoi said.
Akoi had pursued her interest in photography at The London College of Printing (LCP) and completed her Visual Arts degree at the Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) in 2002. On returning to India, she worked independently as a photographer, exhibiting at various Delhi galleries.
She was also the youngest photographer to participate amongst the world's most prominent names in photography at The Rencontres D'Arles, France in 2007.
She photographed her subjects in a makeshift studio which she set up at the shows in a secluded spot away from the hullabaloo.
"I began to sense that the business of dog shows had a definite physical manifestation which showed up. The way the owners held their dogs or talked to them; the ways in which the dogs themselves responded to their owners. They had all become little bits of business on four legs, and it showed,' says Akai.
The exhibition, according to the photographer is a study of relationships these owners have with their dog. She says that most of them whom she met were just happy to be clicked and no one asked her why she was taking their photographs.
"I was struck by the fact that the business end of dog-shows had burgeoned at the expense of care and concern for the dogs themselves," says Akai.
Presently she is working on a body of work comprising black and white images all shot on film, called "the Person in Green', which explores plants and how they depict human relationships.
