A hound named Milo sits demurely in a cone of straw. Beau the husky perks his ears, his head floating within a cloud of mesh. A Dalmatian sporting a Dalmatian-print cone sniffs a matching backdrop. “I wanted to take that post-surgery humiliation—that saddest moment for every pet—and twist it into something beautiful and majestic,” writes New York–based photographer Winnie Au in her new book, Cone of Shame. “I wanted to take the shame out of the cone.” She succeeded: The pages are filled with portraits of sixty dogs wearing cones that are nothing less than works of art.
It all started when Au’s dog got sick. Tartine, a Corgi, had throat cancer, and Au and her husband fought for her life through a month of difficult and costly surgeries and treatments. In the end, Tartine passed away. Au was left with her grief—plus the image of a cone-wearing dog in her head. “This process was about transformation—both visual transformation and for me to take my personal pain and transform it into healing,” she says. “Cones are inherently sad and a little funny, and I wanted to flip those ideas upside down and make it into something majestic.”
Tofu, a bull terrier, in a cone decorated with candy buttons.
Au teamed up with Marie-Yan Morvan, a set designer and art director, and the pair started brainstorming dog breeds and cone materials, with an eye toward complementing the shape and color of each dog. “Some cones are made of traditional fashion materials,” Au says. “Others, not so much.” One is a ring of coral-hued makeup sponges, another consists of coffee filters, while another is made of cracked and speckle-painted eggshells.
Calvin the Komondor’s cone is made of dyed yarn.
In the end, after an initial run of twelve dogs, they got a book deal, and Au decided she would donate a portion of her proceeds to Animal Haven’s Recovery Road Fund in honor of Tartine. She and Morvan then went to work lining up forty-eight more dogs. “We spent a lot of time figuring out size diversity, body diversity, fur diversity, color diversity,” Au says. They plumbed the pets of friends and family, surfed Instagram, and occasionally did some street casting.
Waldo, a Bedlington terrier, wears a cone of custom pom-poms.
The shoots themselves Au kept short and sweet, and while she dispensed lots of treats, she mostly let her subjects sniff around and be themselves. “I wanted to make the dogs look like sculptural works of art,” she says. “I didn’t want them to look too cute, and that was often a challenge because dogs are inherently really cute.”
Jolie the poodle’s cone is a geometric arrangement of make-up sponges.
Her personal favorite? Her own dog, of course—Clementine the basset hound, adopted after Tartine’s passing following a life spent as a mother in a puppy mill. For her portrait, Morvan fashioned a cone made of deflated balloons, meant to complement her droopy ears. “I didn’t think shed be able to do the shoot in studio because she has a lot of anxiety, so I told all the crew to hide in the closet so it would just be me and her and my husband on set,” Au says. “She ended up enjoying all the attention and the string cheese she was getting, and I was so proud of her.”
Images reprinted from Cone of Shame by Winnie Au © 2024, designs by Marie-Yan Morvan © 2024. Published by Union Square & Co.
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