Dogs Their Dykes

0:04 Hello everyone. Hi. Hi everyone. My name is Nessie Upton Smith and my name is Maya House. No, that's not a picture of Justin Bieber. , and we are the people behind Dogs and Their Dites. Dogs and their Dyes is a community- based photography project that we started back in January 2024. To give you a little bit of background about myself, I'm a South Londonbased film photographer focusing mainly on portraits.

0:32 This is one of my favorite projects that I've ever done called Schools Out. I went back to my old school where I started an LGBT society with some of my close friends, Kane, who is here tonight. , I photographed and interviewed the students that were running the society at the time, and I spoke with them about being out at school and their experience of being queer. I then made this into a zen and I sold it during pride month and I donated all the proceeds to different LGBTQ plus charities. I myself am a creative director and throughout my career I have centered it around people, community, culture and activism. I work in social media currently and I've built a lot of pages up from scratch. Tapping into community management and creating platforms for people to share their experiences for my work. I'm always looking to the past for inspiration, especially when it comes to queerness, studying those who have paved the way for us. So many of these images that you see behind me are inherently ingrained in our minds when it comes to thinking about lesbians throughout time. And this whole project is rooted in queer historical imagery. Growing up, we didn't see a lot of images of lesbians or queer people, so we really had to search for them. Through our research, we ca into quibb photography. We came across this gorgeous anthology called Cats and their dikes, which was filled with poems, illustrations, and photography of cats and dikes. , the photography in particular stuck out to us.

2:00 , the candid warm images perfectly captured the intimate relationship between pets and their owners, but also added to an era of queerness, adding to the archive of dikes from the 80s and 90s. The images resonated with us a lot. However, we're dog dyes. So, we wanted to encapsulate this feeling. We wanted to encapsulate this feeling that cats and their dikes captured, but with dogs instead. And that's when dogs and their dikes was born. , yeah. So, we started off the page by finding loads of lesbian celebs in the mainstream media and creating an Instagram story highlight of them. We then asked our local like our community to share photos with us and we called these our local celebs. And in the background of this, I started researching London's vibrant lesbian scene. Obviously, I'm sure some of you have heard of the lesbian renaissance. , but everything from club nights to hiking socials and interacting with lesbians who also love dogs in order to build our following. I was literally going through each page and looking at who follows those pages and seeing if they had a dog on their profile, not to be a stalker. And engaging with those people to build up our audience. We were then ready for our first test shoot.

3:14 This was our test shoot that we did with Maya and Debbie. It was our first time seeing like what the project could really look like and we wanted to use this to show other people our vision. Maya didn't like this image at first, but I loved it.

3:26 So I pushed for her to let me post this on the page and it was very popular when we posted it. From there, we asked friends of friends to shoot with us. And this then built up our page and our audience could understand what our project was about. And we were no longer a spam looking account and we could actually start reaching out to people who weren't thinking that we're complete weirdos.

3:45 We made cards in the summer last year as we wanted to try and reach audience out of Instagram and our immediate echo chamber. , we'd carry these cards everywhere with us. , we had them in our pockets at all times. We were speaking to people on the street or at queer events and we wanted people to be able to put a face to the page and start building our community in real life. Among the many events that we attended and handed the cards out at Mighty Hoopla was one of them and we met some people who wanted to shoot with us and this is them.

4:13 This is Eda M and their dog Paddyy. We recently shot them in Tooting B common. They were connection that we'd made through the business cards. So, it was amazing being able to connect with them in person before shooting cuz this helped with the comfortability and candid nature of our shoots. Cuz for for both of us, we always want everyone, dogs and humans, to feel their most comfortable when they shoot with us.

4:34 This is when we believe the photos are the best they can be. We aim to bring out the personality of everyone we shoot, dogs and humans alike. We've done over 25 shoots in the series so far, and each individual has their own unique story.

4:47 One of the greatest things about me doing this project is meeting other dikes and spending time with them, making them feel comfortable and having insightful conversations, connecting with our community at the source, all through a love for dogs. People invite us to their homes or to familiar spaces, which allows us to capture them in their most natural and candid form. Not only is every human different, but every dog is too.

5:11 This is something we consider and we're very patient with when we're shooting. When we first started this project, we didn't fully consider the age-old saying about working with animals, but over time, we found a rhythm that works for us. I shoot the series on my contacts G2 film camera, as I find it to be fast and reliable, and it captures some really beautiful images. I use one roll of 35 mil per subject, and that gives us around an hour of shooting time. In terms of direction, we always have a slight pan, but we adapt it depending on the dog and the person we are shooting. However, I've had my eyes open to what it really is like working with animals.

5:49 My primary role on set or when we're shooting is a dog whisperer, as I like to call it. , whether it's with treats or talking in a silly voice. I won't put you through that right now. , or dangling my carabiner above the camera. I have to get the attention of the dog. Thank you for that laugh at the back. , allowing the owner to relax and for Nessie to shoot is as much about building a rapport with the dog as it is with the owner.

6:19 This is one of my favorite images from the series.

6:21 This is Pluto and Aish. You can see that Aish is an avid trainer collector and with her portraits, we really wanted to reflect both her personality and her beliefs. Within our work, we tried to provide quiet statements of where we stand because while we may not be a political platform, being queer is inherently political. , this is Anie Wild Blood and Queenie, one of our more recent shoots. , I was really excited cuz we'd followed them across social media for their outfits of the day, which we just love so much, and also their work as disco DJs. , as soon as we saw Anie and their content, we knew that we had to do a shoot with them.

6:56 So, we went to their house in Brighton and we spoke with them about everything from DJing in the '9s to Wild Blood's Pride and Joy, their shed, which they really enjoyed showing us. It was gorgeous. , it was it's such a joy to like speak to people who have paved the way for us and this shoot in particular resonated with our audience. , we started to realize when we're speaking to different platforms, including it's nice that shout out. That the one theme that kept coming up was this theme of chosen family. And we came to realize that although that wasn't something we initially set out to capture, how important it is for queer people to see a family setup that isn't nuclear and this was a theme that crossed borders. We were recently published in Mary Clair Korea where we spoke at length about family and for many queer people, family is something that we create intentionally outside of traditional norms.

7:53 And then this was our D.Va magazine interview for December 2024. As a queer photographer, seeing my work in print has always been a personal goal. But more than that, it also meant we were able to share our project with a wider community. Being published allows us to reach more dyes and more people who want to see themselves in the project. , we're actually doing an in-person event with Goldie Saloon on the 29th of June. Goldies, if you don't know it, is a Flintter space, a queer haven and the heart of our community and also dog friendly. , and our aim with this event is to bring together the community that we've cultivated online in the real world. , for us, this project has helped us feel more in touch with our community, connecting with so many dogs and dyes, and getting to the core of what really matters to us. I mean, lesbian culture is rich in history and resilience, often still remains under represented. , and we wanted to create a space where it's not just acknowledged, but celebrated, helping people and in some ways probably our younger selves see diverse representation of both queer people and chosen family. We feel that dogs and their dikes is important for the queer community because it creates a positive space for representation, validation, and also celebrates queer lives outside of mainstream narratives. It contributes to a growing visual archive of queer life that is personal and intersectional. Anything that we've made from the artic from articles or magazine features has gone straight back into the project as we are committed to keeping the project running. We're also committed to keeping it accessible as we're creating something for the community.

9:33 , we have lots of exciting plans for dogs and their dikes. , we are putting we're working towards doing a photo book and putting on an exhibition in a dog friendly space and also creating a short film that highlights some of our stories amazing stories. I mean, so far we've traveled to Brighton, Maray, and across London, but we want to shoot further both in the UK and beyond to meet more dogs and dikes. Our aim is to literally shoot everyone that reaches out to us. Basically, a shoot sounds horrible, but you get what I mean. My started thinking about this project over a year ago, and we're so proud of where the project has now gone. If there's a passion project that you've been thinking about, please do it cuz doing dogs and their dyes fills me with such pride. It's such an honor to go and meet all these gorgeous dikes and dogs obviously. And people want to see themselves represented. Like if you want to see something, you can go and create it. There is a whole community, no matter the niche, that wants to see a project that represents them. Putting back into your community and creating something for them is more powerful than you'll ever know. , thank you guys so much for listening and thank you so much for it's nice that for having us down to talk. [Applause]