This unique 20 x 24 inch Polaroid from 1999 captures a brief, theatrical encounter between William Wegman’s camera and his beloved dog Battina, also known as Batty, transformed into an improbable starlet.

The monumental format—one-of-a-kind and produced without a negative—demands precision; every hesitation, every twitch becomes part of the performance embedded in the single print.

Against a saturated pink ground, the powder‑pale wig crowns the animal with absurd glamour, sliding effortlessly between fashion shoot, fairy tale, and silent comedy. Batty’s body, still unmistakably canine, resists complete disguise, and that tension between costume and creature generates both humor and a faint melancholy.

The 20 x 24 camera’s rich color and fine detail heighten this play of surfaces, allowing each strand of hair and subtle contour of fur to read like a deliberate brushstroke. Created on the cusp of instant analog photography’s decline, the work doubles as a quiet elegy for a process whose materials were already beginning to disappear.

This Polaroid is therefore not only an image of a dog in a wig but also a rare artifact of photographic history—a singular collaboration between artist, animal, and machine that could never be repeated in exactly the same way.