“I have my dialogue,” said Ms. Davidson, 30. “I want to talk to them before I get a portrait so I get a sense of the person.”

Ms. Davidson spends very little time working with models of the “person” variety these days. The subjects of her ongoing project “Shake” are not perfect. They’re not entirely graceful. They tend to drool.

Since photographer and subject can’t necessarily converse with one another, Ms. Davidson plays with each one before its 15 minutes of fame. The shake, when it comes, is usually provoked by a squirt of water.

It doesn’t always work. Models can, after all, be divas. “It’s not something that you have a lot of control over,” Ms. Davidson acknowledged with a laugh.

Ms. Davidson grew up in New York. Two of her early jobs — working on a nature preserve and later as a photo assistant — have converged in her career. She majored in sociology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and interned at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, where she was hired to work with the zoo’s birds of prey.

But when she was injured in a car accident a couple of years ago, Ms. Davidson began making photos for the zoo, instead.

“Shake” is in its early stages. The series is an offshoot of a book project onpets with disabilities. While working on that, Ms. Davidson tested some new high-speed mono lights on a round-faced Bordeaux. “I uploaded the photos and I was cracking up,” she said.

Carli Davidson

It would be remiss not to mention the project’s ugly duckling, a 3-week-old kitten that had yet to perfect the “shake” motion. But at this point, the work is fairly dog-centric. Ms. Davidson has 10 canine subjects lined up over the next month and a half. Among them: a corded poodle — pleasantly dreadlocked — and a bug-eyed pug, “just one of the most hideously adorable dogs,” she said.

from:    http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/sit-shake-a-paw-now-just-shake/?hp