Daniel Beck doesn’t own a pit bull, but he photographs them. And he has been for the past ten years in the Bay Area, mostly in San Francisco.
On a typical gloomy Thursday morning in the Excelsior, Beck was doing another photo shoot for a pit bull inside Excelsior Coffee at 4495 Mission St. The star of the show was Romy, a five-month-old blue-nose pit bull with blue-ish gray hair, who was adopted two months ago by the coffee shop owner, Lea Sabado. Romy was not there by herself.
Instead, on Beck’s advice, the whole family came. The environment and families of the pit bulls adds more backstory for his photos.
So the family of six showed up, including Romy the pit bull and Ranger, a two-year-old foster, possibly an Australian Shepherd. Sabado and her husband, Andre Higginbotham, laughed and greeted guests in line for their morning cups. Their two sons, a three-year-old and a six-year-old, ran around the coffee shop, sometimes taking over the leashes. The dogs, excited too, followed the two boys around and occasionally received loving pats from the customers.
By the time they arrived at around 10 a.m., Beck had already been waiting, with a black cross-body bag of film, camera and lens and an orange plaid shirt tucked in the bag. Even though his apartment’s ban on dogs keeps him from getting one, he is good at getting along with them and capturing candid shots.
He uses a fisheye lens for a wider background if the space is confined and he’s backed up against a wall. He knows to always bring little dog treats. He knows to shout “treat!” or “snack!” and makes “tsk, tsk” or “brrr” sounds to attract the attention of pit bulls.
And on Thursday morning, all of the little tricks worked with Romy and Ranger. For most of the time, Romy stayed put while Ranger constantly got distracted by customers walking around.
“Ranger! Here!” Beck repeated throughout the 30-minute photoshoot. In the end, Beck was sweating, but satisfied that he got all the shots he needed.
Born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, Beck immigrated to the United States with his family in 2010, when he was 23. For the first year, he lived in Broward County in Florida, where he found out that the neighboring county, Miami-Dade, had pit bulls after a 1989 incident in which a pit bull mauled a 7-year-old girl.
He recalled the same misconception about pit bulls being aggressive in Brazil, where his wife comes from, and in Israel, where he grew up. “Pit bulls were considered gangster dogs,” Beck said. “And monsters that will eat you alive or kill you because they have strong jaws.”
He thinks pit bulls are deeply misunderstood — in the past, he said, he read it somewhere on the Internet, that pit bulls are nanny dogs to look after children.
Beck was then shocked when he moved to San Francisco a year later and found pit bulls “everywhere.” People from all walks of life own pit bulls — and love them.
He took his first photo of pit bulls at Potrero Hill, and he never stopped. Since then, he has been taking pictures of pit bulls of all kinds whenever he runs into one on the street — blue noses with blueish gray fur like Romy, red noses with warm reddish or brown fur, American bullies with a muscular and chunky build but gentle personalities, and on rare occasions, some bull terriers who are playful characters with egg-shaped heads.
Sometimes they are not even real-life pit bulls. He also documents marks of them that show how people perceive this breed of dogs — a tattoo of a one on the back of its owner’s hand, a graffiti of another at Potrero Avenue and 24th Street by a pit bull owner, a sign that says “beware, pit bull” on the front porch of someone’s house with no dog in sight.
Beck also collects stories about the dogs — One who used to be a fight dog deserted by a ring in Chicago with its ears cut off. One who was named “scar” because its former owner used to pour acid on its back so that it would “look tough” with a big scar on the back. One that slept behind fencing guarding its homeless owner sleeping on the sidewalk.
So far, he has taken photos of over 200 pit bulls for his ongoing project, “Pit bulls of San Francisco,” and he hopes one day he will make a coffee-table book out of it.
“There is no bad dog. Only bad owners,” Beck said. “It depends on how you raise your dog.”
Wow, talk about cornering a niche market! Anybody here remember the concrete mixer trucks seen on the streets of San Francisco with the slogan “Find a need and fill it!” painted on the drum? Good on ya, Mr.Beck. Mazeltov– and Boa Sorte!