William Wegman’s Lucia de Lammermoor, 2007, compresses comedy, tragedy and technical bravura into a single 20 × 24-inch Polaroid. Through a torn black aperture that doubles as stage and wound, a satin-clad Weimaraner advances into a pool of crimson light. Raven wig, bridal veil and steady, almost human gaze conjure Donizetti’s doomed Lucia, while red latex paws stand in for the heroine’s blood-stained hands, translating opera’s most famous mad scene into Wegman’s mischievous canine vernacular.

The photograph was produced with Polaroid’s colossal 20 × 24 camera, a 107-kilogram device that turned every session into live theatre: lighting, costume and canine performer had to align perfectly before the shutter fell, because each exposure yielded a unique positive that could never be retouched. By 2007 Polaroid’s giant sheets were already disappearing, so the work feels like an elegy to a medium whose lush color and instant tactility no digital process can truly replicate. The image’s pearly whites, velvety blacks and smoky reds attest to what that chemistry could deliver in a single, unrepeatable moment.

Opera had entered Wegman’s world nearly two decades earlier, when the Metropolitan Opera invited him to create a suite of canine Polaroids for its publicity materials. That commission seeded a menagerie of costumed divas, baritones and silent supers that resurface whenever Wegman wishes to test the boundary between dignity and farce. Lucia de Lammermoor revisits that collaboration with a darker temperature: the visual pun still rises to the surface, yet sorrow clings to the dog’s unblinking eyes, hinting at the price of roles imposed from without.

What ultimately makes the photograph resonate is its doubleness. It is at once a tender portrait of a beloved companion and a distilled meditation on performance itself. Between the veil’s gauzy folds and the animal’s frank stare lies a question that hovers over every stage, studio and social mask: how much of any part we play is pure costume, and how much is the irrepressible self leaking through? Wegman leaves the answer suspended in that instant when imagination hardens into image, inviting viewers to complete the aria in the silent space beyond the frame.