When thinking about street photography, it’s common to focus on the activities of humans — and why not? We are infinitely diverse, often very interesting, sometimes beautiful, and equally likely to be ugly.

I’ve made something of a rod for my own back with my bicycle photography, and believe me, I’ve still made a few of those images during the last few weeks, but it started feeling a bit stale. I needed something new.

And of course, living among us, intimately woven into the very warp and weft of our family lives, are thousands of other creatures of the streets, who love nothing better than a stroll and sniff in the great outdoors, even in an urban setting, and who are also fascinating to watch and photograph. These are our dogs.

This isn’t a new idea. American snapper Elliott Erwitt had a wonderful line in doggie street shots, which took the eye down to canine level for a fresh view of the humour and absurdity of city life. Those are his above.

So, while in Sicily this last couple of weeks, I have been focusing less on people and more on dogs — so I started trying to get close to people with dogs to see what I could do.

It was OK, but hardly Erwitt-level wit and intrigue. They were pampered pooches on a hot day. The key was to engage — so I fed a little phrase into my translation app, and set to on the streets of Palermo, Agrigento, Catania and Siracusa.

I like to think this got us down to the level of the dogs themselves. And the funny thing is, while people are never super happy to be photographed, if you ask to take a pic of their pup, they love it. Because they love their pet, and understand that you might find it cute too.

Come on — tell me you can’t immediately see these hounds’ personalities from their body language and — despite their humans’ insistence on dressing them up a bit — their absolute dogness? Of course you can!

These ones above put a little more of the human in, which might help signal something of the relationship between animal and person — I’m not sure. It does give something of the animals’ view of us, though, don’t you think?

What also became obvious that doggos don’t give a yap about having a camera shoved in their face: there’s no shyness, no mugging, posing, recoiling, pouting or self-consciousness. They are just who they are, and the human gaze does nothing to change that. This little chap was, perhaps, a little suspicious of all the attention, but his inner wolf is undeterred.

I’ve shot a couple more cane since this batch, so they may appear at some point. One thing I still need to do better is to take note of these guys’ and girls’ names. I did ask, but in the welter of requesting, shooting, praising the models, showing the humans the pics, etc. the names slipped from my ageing memory. Must do better.

This isn’t Erwitt-level artistry by any measure, but it’s so much fun I can see street dog photography becoming a thing for me going forward. And it does help a little to assuage the fact that D and I both miss our Archie. Here’s one of him, also doing the street dog thing — on a rainy Braidwood day.

Now tell me that’s not a Very Good Dog.