Best in Show @ JL Modern

DECEMBER 20 – JANUARY 17, 2026

JL Modern Gallery presents Best in Show, a curated celebration of photography’s most enduring companions. Bringing together classic and contemporary images in which dogs appear as protagonists, confidants, and unexpected scene stealers, the exhibition traces how photographers have turned to canine presence to explore loyalty, humor, status, and the quiet rituals of everyday life.

From early 20th-century streets and beaches to mid-century boulevards and music festivals, the exhibition gathers humanist and documentary visions in which dogs move naturally through the frame. Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s elegant Parisian walkers and seaside snapshots, André Kertész’s animals cutting through fresh snow, and images by Martin Dain, Louis Stettner, Louis Faurer, John Loring, William Witt, and others describe cities and neighborhoods through the easy companionship between children, strangers, and their dogs. In these works, the animals become anchors of gesture and mood, grounding scenes of play, work, and urban drift.

Best in Show also looks at how fashion and celebrity photographers have embraced dogs to soften glamour and add narrative spark. Arthur Elgort’s portraits of models and muses on the move, William Helburn’s poised figures crossing Penn Station with a whippet at heel, Terry O’Neill’s Brigitte Bardot on set with a dog, Larry Fried’s John F. Kennedy at play with his pet, and Harry Benson’s portraits that fold dogs into the theater of public life all show how a canine presence can disarm formality, complicate a pose, or underscore intimacy.

Elliott Erwitt and William Wegman bring wit and formal invention to the fore, turning dogs into the linchpins of visual surprise. Erwitt’s celebrated compositions, with cropped legs, leaping bodies, and mismatched scales, recast city sidewalks and parks as stages for sight gags and small dramas, while Wegman’s carefully staged Weimaraner transforms the animal into a sculptural, almost anthropomorphic presence. Spanning more than a century of picture making, from vintage silver gelatin prints to large-scale archival pigment photographs, Best in Show reveals dogs not as props but as collaborators that redirect attention, open emotional space, and connect viewers to their own memories.