Elias Weiss Friedman

Coming up next on Passion Struck.

The dog doesn't have to ask you a question of like, how are you doing?

Just being in their presence and they have an ability to listen and sense the way you're feeling and whether it's eye contact, touch, warmth.

letting you connect with them there's just something that it has a powerful way of making you feel better and de-escalating and relieving stress they're the best listeners and even though they don't speak to you they know exactly what to say and there's also a stigma around mental health not everyone's going to raise their hand and say i need help so with a dog you don't have to raise your hand they just show up for you and

I'm great.

How are you doing?

My origin story, I think, would have to date back to when I was a kid.

There's a picture of me in 1988 being licked by my grandmother's dog, Oreo, like on the face.

And you can see a big smile on my face.

So probably that was the very beginning of me really loving dogs.

And since then, I developed a love for photography.

and, but didn't know exactly what to do with my creative spirit.

And coming from the family of two physicians, the first thought was, oh, maybe I'll be a doctor.

But I moved to New York City, was working in brand strategy at an agency, was part of a layoff, and decided to dust off my camera and was inspired by Humans of New York and The Sartorialist, those street photography blogs, and said, well, no one's doing this for dogs.

and it seemed like a bit of a joke at the time because it's like well who's going to take dog photography so seriously but i was like i will and so it's a long story short the rest is history 11 years later 50 000 dogs photographed i'm not i'm in retrospect i'm not surprised people love the project but at the time it was a little bit wild

Well, I think before I started the doggist, I was like, I don't know, like an unveiled artist.

I knew that I loved dogs, but I wasn't ready to create a whole project around it.

But I was encouraged by other friends in the tech space in New York city and

of these sort of like aha moments, like the name, the Doggists.

It's like someone who dogs.