Winnie Au’s coffee-table book, Cone of Shame, features studio portraits of 60 pups in custom-designed cones. Images reprinted from Cone of Shame by Winnie Au © 2024, designs by Marie-Yan Morvan © 2024. Published by Union Square & Co.

Books

Cone of Shame? Try Cone of Fame

In her new book, photographer Winnie Au (COM’03) takes the humiliation out of the veterinary collar—and adds some style

We’ve all seen it—a dog leaving an appointment with the vet, mortified by that big plastic cone around its head. Known as an Elizabethan collar, the cone is used to keep the pet from licking or chewing at a wound or stitches. Brooklyn-based photographer Winnie Au (COM’03) watched her corgi, Tartine, wear one at times after a cancer diagnosis. Tartine died in 2017. Grieving, Au also found a seed of inspiration. 

“Every time I saw a dog wearing a cone, I knew there was something I could do with it, visually,” Au says. “And even though time had passed, we were still sad about [Tartine], so I think I wanted to find a way to connect all the dots.”

Now she has a new dog, a basset hound named Clementine, and a new coffee-table book, Cone of Shame (Union Square & Co., 2024) with her friend, designer Marie-Yan Morvan. The book features Au’s studio portraits of 60 different canines posing in striking cones custom designed by Morvan, replacing stigma and embarrassment with beauty and dignity. A portion of the proceeds goes to benefit Animal Haven’s Recovery Road Fund, to pay for urgent medical care for rescue dogs in need.

“One thing I’m interested in artistically is taking things that are kind of shameful or very sad and turning it around,” Au says. “So it was a goal to take the cone and transform what we see it as and make it into this beautiful majestic moment.”

Recruiting the dogs involved casting a wide net—from professional sources she knew from the advertising industry to dogs she’d meet on the street. The cones comprise a bunch of different materials, like candy dots on backing paper, fabrics, and wire, and she and Morvan worked hard to match them to the dogs.

The results are sometimes comic, sometimes serious—even abstract.

The standard poodle Jolie looks every bit the diva in a high-fashion cone—more of a wreath, really—Morvan made out of makeup sponges. Wrapped in a ring of orange yarn, Calvin the komondor, with his long, distinctive coat, becomes a faceless, almost surreal concept canine. Hank the wolfhound-sheepdog mix looks less than thrilled with the blend of real and plastic greenery ringing his mug. And Patch the dalmatian hides in plain sight with a fabric cone and backdrop that match his spotted coat.

“It was a goal to take the cone and transform what we see as the cone of shame, and make it into this beautiful majestic moment,” Au says.

Au has loved animals since she was a kid growing up around Rockford, Ill.

“It’s really, like, cornfield country,” she says. “Everyone has farms. All the kids I went to school with were working on farms and living on them. So there are animals everywhere. And then, we had a stray dog that just appeared at our house one day, named Lucky. He looked kind of like a Tibetan spaniel, but he was just a mutt. And he came with a cat and, like, seven kittens. I was into lizards, I had a turtle, my dad had fish, we had a parrot, a cockatiel. And my sister had a hamster. There were always animals around.”

Lucky lived outside, where he had a little kennel, but it was very different than having a pampered pet, Au says. “Our current dog has three beds for the house and she turns anything that’s mine into her own bed.”

After losing Tartine, Au began the project in 2017, recruiting Morvan, a set, prop, and sometime costume designer she’d met on a fashion magazine shoot.

“We met for coffee and I said, ‘I have this personal project I want to work on. Would you be interested?’ And it definitely ticked a lot of boxes for her too,” Au says. “She hadn’t worked a lot with dogs at that point, but I knew she had this great sensibility of understanding how to create things out of nowhere.

“As artists, we’re always looking for ways to explore new ideas that you don’t get to do when you have a client or even a magazine that you’re working for. So we had full freedom to do what we wanted.”

A lot of trial and error was involved, especially in that first series of a few dogs. There are plenty of references on standard fashion shoots—artists clip and print images to tack to mood boards that guide and inspire them. There weren’t a lot—OK, any—references for dogs with cones, which meant the work was “challenging and fun at the same time,” Au says.

There was also a new set of practical considerations. The cones couldn’t be too heavy for the dogs, and materials involved had to be nontoxic and preferably not attractive to chew on. The wide range of sizes among the dogs meant one size cone definitely did not fit all.

“I didn’t want to repeat breeds, because there’s such a wonderful range of dogs out there,” Au says. “I wanted to get as many of them in the book as possible, so it’s like diversity of dog fur. And sizing. And different textures and colors.”

The animals’ reactions were hard to predict.

“One dog, her cone is made of cotton, and she just kept falling asleep,” Au says. “She was literally sitting on set getting her photo taken, and she just kept blinking and blinking and then nodding off. And other dogs, you know, they just wanna shake it off. They’re done after two seconds. And other ones were just curious and unsure of what’s going on.”

For all the cuteness and fun on display though, Au had higher-level goals.

“The goal of this series was to make something more abstracted,” she says, “where we looked at the dog as not only a cute animal, but also seeing it more as a sculpture, seeing them as a piece of art, basically.”