INTERVIEW
The whole world, one dog
Jonathan Posner’s 635-page passion project began as a pamphlet about his pet. Four years later, it’s become a love letter to photography, Hampstead Heath and one small white dog that changed his life. Peter Dench finds out.
Hampstead Heath, January 2021. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
It would be easy to mock Jonathan Posner’s The Whole World and His Dog. A colossal hardback about his dog Daisy and Hampstead Heath. With 47 personal essays and his 42 in-depth top tips for photography, it might sound like the sort of self-published indulgence best left to family and friends. But it isn’t. It’s a book of such conviction, craft and curious beauty that you end up applauding its intent and admiring its execution.
‘It started as a pamphlet,’ Posner admits when we speak at his north London home, located on the fringes of Hampstead Heath’s southern border. ‘Just a few of the best pictures I’d taken of my dog.
‘I wasn’t a dog photographer; she just happened to be there. I thought that I’d print it cheaply for myself, simply as a keepsake for when the time came. Then one thing just led to another and it became a four-year collaboration.’
The collaborator in question is Bulgarian designer Svetla Meijer, whom Posner originally hired to teach him Adobe InDesign online. After months of failed attempts to grasp the software, she put down her stylus and suggested designing the book with Posner. The result is a triumph of partnership. ‘I briefed her to make sure every turn of the page revealed something new,’ Posner says. ‘No repeated layouts. Every spread should surprise. She found the photos that convey the emotion of the stories.’
That sense of discovery is crucial. The book, printed in Italy to exacting standards, isn’t just an album of canine snapshots or misty Heathland scenes. It’s a work of design devotion. The typeface (Meta Pro, paired with Franklin Gothic Condensed) chosen in homage to a 1990s interior design book he worshipped. ‘I wanted it to be beautiful,’ he tells me. ‘When people turned the pages, I wanted them to see something they hadn’t seen before. To be kept in that sense of wanting to carry on.’
A pandemic, a dog, and a rediscovery
Posner, who recently turned 70, is a man with several creative lives behind him. He spent years as a location manager on long-running ITV police drama The Bill, photographing fictional crack dens and council estates in south London, before moving into fashion photography. ‘Landscape photography never interested me,’ he says. ‘For 40 years I never took a single picture on Hampstead Heath. Then the pandemic hit, my work collapsed and I realised all I had was my dog, my camera and the Heath.’
Hampstead Heath, January 2021. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
Posner has lived in this part of north London all his life. Each day at the same time during lockdown, he took Daisy for a walk. His Fujifilm X-S10 camera came too, slotted neatly into a Billingham Hadley camera bag alongside 16-80mm f/4 and 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 lenses. ‘At first it felt counterintuitive,’ he admits. ‘I’d always been one of those photographers who puts the camera away when the job’s done. But one day I read an interview where my hero David Bailey, now in his eighties, goes back into the house because he’s “forgotten his camera”. That’s when I thought: if Bailey still takes one everywhere, so should I.’
Over the next four years, he took around 12,000 photographs. ‘Some days I took none, others I took a hundred,’ he says. ‘But every day, because the camera was with me, I was looking at Hampstead Heath as a photographer, which I’d never done before.’
Even the book title came about by accident. ‘I was late for a meeting with Svetla,’ he laughs. ‘I said, “Sorry, I met the whole world and his dog on the way.” She didn’t know the phrase and told me to write it down. I did, and then a week later realised she was right. That was the title.’
For those who don’t know, the whole world and his dog’ is a British saying meaning ‘too many people.’ It’s a fitting name for a book that balances solitude and companionship, personal reflection and the bustle of public space. Hampstead Heath, after all, is where London comes to breathe and to walk the dog.
Beyond Daisy
The book is inevitably bound up with Daisy, the small white Cavachon dog who accompanied Posner through the pandemic and beyond. But he’s clear that she isn’t the subject so much as the thread. ‘She wasn’t my muse,’ he says. ‘She was my conduit. Through her, I could explore loneliness, loss, joy, and the strangeness of human behaviour. But I wanted the book to transcend the dog.’
In one story, Commuters’ Tales, he describes passing a series of solitary people on park benches and wanting to comfort them, a scene inspired by a childhood radio play of the same name. Daisy’s brief interruptions allow him to move through the moment, using her as a gentle narrative device. Elsewhere, she appears in fleeting cameos, always in relation to something larger: the light, the weather or just the rhythm of the walk.
Hampstead Heath, November 2022. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
There’s poignancy here, as well. The book was finished just before Daisy’s death in 2024.
The precise what3words coordinates for every photograph in the book are listed. Daisy’s resting place remains a secret. She lives on in the book.
A photographer reborn
What’s striking about The Whole World and His Dog is how it reframes what a photographer’s practice can be. The book has eight photo-only interludes which act as a visual sorbet to the stories. Posner has written 42 ‘discoveries’ about photography, short essays ranging from style and composition to camera straps and Billingham bags. ‘It’s me emptying my pockets,’ he says. ‘Everything I’ve learned in 50 years. I want to give it all back, so that anyone who loves photography can find something in it.’
Hampstead Heath, July 2021. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
His love of colour (he admits to being almost on the spectrum about it) runs throughout. The influence of Italian cinema, particularly Michelangelo Antonioni, infuses his compositions with a cinematic stillness. There are no filters, no HDR tricks. Just attention, patience and the daily act of looking.
‘What makes it different,’ he says, ‘is that it’s not a book of landscape photography. Of Hampstead Heath with calendar-type photos. I wanted to make something graphic, rich and human. Something that couldn’t be put into a category.’
Joy and mortality
For all its scale and sentiment, there’s no self-pity in The Whole World and His Dog. The tone is warm, wry and self-aware. Posner knows how it might look, an older man making an epic book about his dog, but he disarms that with honesty. ‘I just wanted to finish it. It’s my life’s trade-off: no wife, no kids, but this book could only exist because of that.’
One man and his dog, Jonathan Posner with Daisy, May 2024. Photo by Lizzie Quek
That mortality adds emotional ballast to what might otherwise be whimsy. One reader told him the book reminded her of a South Korean novel, ‘gentle, human, almost Zen-like.’ Another said they couldn’t stop crying at the end. Posner himself calls it ‘a journey through joy and memory.’
In the final pages, there’s even a glimpse of continuity: a new dog, Mousse, who by cosmic coincidence was born a few days before Daisy died. ‘They had three days together,’ he smiles. ‘People warned me not to expect the same character, but because they overlapped, I think Daisy passed on her instructions.’
A labour of love
At 70, Posner has no illusions about bestseller lists or prizes. What he wants is readers and conversation. ‘I printed a thousand copies. I just want it to be talked about, bought, read. We all do, if we’re writers.’
Hampstead Heath, October 2022. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
There’s a humility in that ambition. For all its eccentric grandeur, The Whole World and His Dog is not really about dogs or even about Hampstead Heath. It’s about looking closer, living slower and finding meaning in the familiar. For photographers, there’s much to learn in its pages. For everyone else, there’s something rarer still, a sense of unguarded sincerity.
Hampstead Heath, May 2023. Photo by: Jonathan Posner
As Posner says, ‘I hope people see it for what it is. A love letter to photography, to the Heath, and to one small white dog who changed my life.’
The Whole World and His Dog by Jonathan Posner is published by Buchanan Press and is available directly from andhisdog.com and Amazon. Instagram @and_his_dog
Thank you to www.amateurphotographer.com