Plato's Dogs

For over two years, photographer Thomas Roma mounted his camera on an eight-foot pole and projected it out and over the dogs at a dusty Brooklyn dog run in order to photograph their shadows. Plato's Dogs is simultaneously foreign and familiar in its depiction of its subjects. On one hand, the dogs look little like themselves in the pictures, distorted and featureless in their silhouettes. But on the other, they appear truer to their essential self, their primitive substance and oddly given the misleading nature of the shadow in Plato's cave allegory closer to their Platonic form.