The Dogist Comes to Amenia to Talk About the Life-Changing Power of Dogs

A plucky Biewer Terrier, her tongue out sticking to the side. A Chow Chow with fur so fluffy, his eyes are nearly hidden. A Siberian Husky who grabs the camera with his paws. Elias Weiss Friedman walks the streets of New York City with a camera in hand, ready to take short portraits of the dogs he encounters. Known as the @thedogist on Instagram, he’s been capturing dogs for his 7.7 million followers since 2013. On August 24, he’ll be at Troutbeck in Amenia to discuss his new book, This Dog Will Change Your Life, and all that he’s learned as a dog photographer.

Friedman started photographing his own dogs when he was a preteen, but his career as the Dogist only launched after he was laid off from his corporate job and took to Instagram. He was inspired by Humans of New York, an Instagram account that showcases portraits of strangers on the street and writes snippets of their lives in the captions.

“Photography is 100 percent honest and candid. There’s an art to getting a candid picture of a person, but most of the time, you take a portrait of a person and they smile because they know they’re having their picture taken,” Friedman says. “With a dog, they’re not burdened by ego. You can photograph them any way you want. They show you who they are. There’s something so refreshing about that as a photographer—you trust that they are being themselves in that moment.”

Friedman has published two photography books, The Dogist: Photographic Encounters with 1,000 Dogs and The Dogist Puppies, but This Dog Will Change Your Life is his first narrative book. At its core, it’s about how dogs turn people into better versions of themselves. Published in June, it’s already a New York Times bestseller.

All three of Friedman's books have been New York Times bestsellers. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.

There’s a universal connection that people find within the dog-human relationship that Friedman is able to capture. “They say you need 10,000 hours [to become an expert at something], I got 10,000 dogs—or really 50,000 dogs,” says Friedman. “I think I’ve become an expert at understanding what dogs mean to people. I felt like I had so many interesting experiences and stories that it was time for me to distill that and write a book.”

This Dog Will Change Your Life chronicles how dogs change a person’s identity, their relationships, and their purpose. It draws from all of the thousands of interactions that Friedman has had with others about their dogs, as well as from his own life. He tells a story of a woman who rescued a dog in Thailand whose back legs were broken, and she was able to transport the dog back to America and provide it around-the-clock care. Now, the dog has prosthetics and lives a full life.

“A dog doesn’t look at a situation and say, ‘Oh, man, I can’t do it.’ They don’t consider failure,” says Friedman. “Just by being around dogs, we become more like them. They’re just a source of joy and positivity in the world.”

Tickets to his talk at the Troutbeck are $40 advanced, $50 at doors, and $35 for Troutbeck members. Each ticket includes a copy of This Dog Will Change Your Life, and after the talk, there will be a book signing.