For more than 25 years, Amanda Jones ’89 has been capturing dogs of all breeds, colors, and sizes—in her camera lens. As a professional dog photographer, she’s traveled across the country in her campervan, which also serves as mobile studio, meeting clients and their furry friends in their home cities.
After Jones graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in cinema and photography, she wasn’t quite sure what type of photography she wanted to pursue, so she spent time interning and working as an assistant at Russell French Photography, a studio in Portland, Maine. There, she learned the business.
“My inspiration growing up was Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger,” Jones said. “Both of them were celebrity photographers. While I wasn’t necessarily interested in doing the celebrity thing, I loved portrait photography.”
In 1994, she moved to San Francisco with her husband. “I said to him on the drive out across the country, ‘I want to do something different. I want to find a real niche and do that,’” Jones said. “I didn’t know what it was going to be at all.”
While in San Francisco, Jones met friends in the city who had dogs. She set up a white background and put the dogs on set, giving them the full portraiture treatment and conveying the message that dogs were people, too. Jones photographed six different dogs that day—the start of her career in dog photography and the first of hundreds of thousands of pictures.
“They just raved over the images,” she said. “And I loved taking them. And that was it.”