Marta Roca grew up in Barcelona in an apartment too small for the big dogs her mother loved. She never had a dog of her own. Instead, she had Snoopy — the cartoon beagle — as an imaginary friend. Decades later, after training as a graphic designer in London and setting up her own studio in Melbourne, she and Christina Teresinski were brainstorming what to make next when the words ‘dog’ and ‘culture’ collided. What started as a blog in 2011 became, by 2014, a biannual print magazine: Four & Sons, 144 pages of what Roca calls half a kilo of four-legged goodness.
The premise is simple but the execution is anything but: dogs as muses, explored through the worlds of art, photography, music, design, literature, and even mathematics. Each issue mixes commissioned photo essays with tributes to iconic dog photographers — Elliott Erwitt, William Wegman, Peter Hujar, Mary Ellen Mark, Bruce Weber — alongside interviews with creative dog people: a New York City ballerina, Osaka furniture designers, London restaurateurs, Bangladeshi street kids and their strays. Photographer Winnie Au transformed veterinary neck cones into haute couture. Artist Masha Shishova sketched the same rescue dog a hundred different ways. The magazine won Best Photography at the Stack Awards, and the British Journal of Photography profiled Roca’s curatorial approach in depth.
Distributed from Melbourne across three continents — Perimeter in Australia, Antenne Books for Europe and the US — Four & Sons is stocked at MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, Magma, and McNally Jackson alongside the world’s best independent bookshops. Roca, who still has never owned a dog, describes herself as bringing an outsider’s objectivity to the subject. The result is a magazine that does not try to help you groom your pet or find the best jerky. It is, instead, a publication that treats the human-canine bond as one of the richest, strangest, and most creatively generative relationships on earth.
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