Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer

Within the genre of commercial animal photography, Walter Chandoha is a master. His photographs of cats in particular have appeared in the pages of National Geographic and Life magazine, and have been absorbed into the public subconscious via countless posters, pet-food packaging, T-shirts and other uses. The Internet is awash with cat pictures, but Chandoha's cat pictures might be seen as the forefather of them all.
Chandoha's images are striking not only for their singular charm, but also for having established a vocabulary of the animal studio portrait with a signature look--clean, brightly colored backdrops and high-key "glamour" backlighting of the subjects. The Cat Photographer is a fun book, but it also offers insight into the unique career of a successful commercial photographer who carved out his own niche. Here, Chandoha is interviewed by David La Spina, who has been working with Chandoha and his family to bring his archive to public attention, and Brittany Hudak. The interview includes photography tips and diagrams of Chandoha's studio setup, and an account of how the photographer came to make a living with animal photography.
Walter Chandoha (born 1920) has worked as a freelance photographer for more than four decades, landing more than 300 magazine covers and thousands of advertising campaigns. He began photographing cats shortly after the end of World War II. "Although I did not realize it at the time," recalls Chandoha about his early cat photographs, "we were building a stock picture file that is still yielding today, some 50 years later."