RALEIGH, N.C. — Every week, Shannon Johnstone takes one dog for a walk to the top of the old North Wake Landfill, a 470-foot peak built from 20 years of Raleigh, N.C., garbage.
It’s a park now, covered with dirt, grass and a polyethylene liner.
But for Johnstone, an art professor at Meredith College, this Kilimanjaro of trash serves as a dark metaphor.
The dogs she brings to the top all come from the Wake County, N.C., Animal Center. All of them have been homeless for at least two weeks, and some of them for more than a year.
They persist in cages, lonely, confused and threatened with euthanasia if they can’t get adopted — a final-option scenario that would send their remains to a landfill much like this one used to be.
On their way to the top, Johnstone photographs each dog with her Canon 5D camera, capturing them as they graze on landfill grass and taste the air at one of Wake County’s highest points. Her pictures are both haunting and uplifting, hopeful and grim — an invitation to love and a glimpse at death.
Rose. Mistletoe. Julius. Partridge. Momma. Percy. They’re Johnstone’s landfill dogs: 66 so far. Some found homes right away. Some returned to their cages. Five of them died.
It’s like photographing a grandfather in a cemetery. Close to the edge, nearing the end, the subject becomes more beautiful as you contemplate its loss.
Taking a neglected pit bull for a pet grows more tempting once you imagine the injection that can put it to sleep for good.
But the idea grows even stronger when you see the dog as a happy animal, off for a run on a hill made from other things people threw away.
As art, Johnstone’s work isn’t a gun to your head. She’s not trying to make you feel guilty.
She just wants you to see the heart of the things we often overlook.
“They’re good dogs,” she said. “They just weren’t lucky.”
At age 40, Johnstone brings a loaded résumé to this project, which is taking shape on a yearlong sabbatical from Meredith. She has degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rochester Institute of Technology, and she’s won an armload of awards.
‘Wind in his fur’
Separate from this project, she has sent her Meredith students into shelters. Johnstone has also photographed animals before, during and after euthanasia — a project undertaken in a city she promised not to name.
It galled her that animals are considered property under the law and that the same branch of government that operates a landfill is placed in charge of an animal shelter. Her idea actually came at the suggestion of Wake County’s former environmental director, except that he wanted to bring dozens of dogs to the park; Johnstone settled on the idea of one at a time.
It isn’t journalism. Johnstone removes the dogs’ leashes from the pictures with the help of Photoshop. But her work strikes the same muckraking chord as it pries up floorboards to let in some light.
She started with Firenze, a pit-bull-mix male who got adopted right away.
“I put my arm around him,” she said. “He wanted to have the wind in his fur.”
Next came Greyson, a pit bull who is still waiting for a home 13 months after his photo shoot.
Then came Ali G., who just wasn’t adoptable. He was the first of the landfill dogs to go.
“I have a whole spreadsheet,” Johnstone said.
