above: Scruffles from Fairfield was Diana’s only cat client to signal when he needed a little break. He’d go for a walk in the yard and come back ready to continue.
Tell me about him,” Diana Haskell says, turning her studied gaze to Winston, an eight-year-old Goldendoodle whose profile serves as the cell phone screensaver for a visitor to her Fairfield photography studio. The pet, like most well-loved domestic animals, holds a venerated place in his family. And according to Diana, the affection she sees is completely mutual.
“You can tell how much he adores whoever took that picture,” she says, confident in her assessment of this animal’s emotions. “Because dogs don’t look at just anyone quite that way.”
Diana is certain of this connection because she spends so much time looking through her lens at pets and people who love each other.
The photographer has amassed an international clientele who seek out her talents to document unique and special relationships with their beloved creatures. Her work goes beyond capturing awe-worthy portraits of treasured family pets. While many of her subjects are incredibly photogenic dogs and cats, Diana’s gift is for honing in on the emotional bond that exist between pets and their owners.
“I love this art form and capturing animals this way because I think you can see and feel these in-between moments that you couldn’t capture if you were painting a portrait,” she says. “It’s like seeing the love in that animal’s eyes. There are these subtle things you just find with a camera that you can’t access any other way.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Diana relocated from Manhattan to Fairfield in search of space in the months after adopting her now tween daughter, Lucie, from China. “Having her in the city during a lockdown was just no way to assimilate,” she says. So, they settled in an antique home (fittingly, an 1890 veterinary hospital) where Diana set up her studio in a converted barn on the property perched on a pond in a rural part of town.
The artist quickly established local connections—and her growing Fairfield County clientele—by putting an open social media call out to town women and their canines to sit for portraits.
She curated these dog-mom bonding ses-sions into a glossy coffee table book, Moms of Fairfield and the Large Dogs Who Love Them. That led to a January 2024 exhibition at the Fairfield Museum and a current, ongoing project that will feature as many as 70 women from throughout the county posing with a diverse menagerie of animals.
“I started thinking, ‘Why is a Saint Bernard more important than a hedgehog, if a hedgehog is what you love?’, ” Diana says of her decision to expand her subject matter. “So, if someone wants to pose with their pet snake, I want to include that. To me, that love is beautiful, too.”
Although she traces her deep connection to animals and photography back to childhood, she took a circuitous route to her current vo- cation. “As a kid, there was always a leash in my hand and just as often, a camera,” she says. “But there were a lot of unexpected detours.”
Let’s start at the Bronx Zoo, where Diana as a teenager talked her way into a job. She later worked with animals (including a favorite orangutang who liked her so much she could hang in his cage) at the London Zoo. Yet her pragmatic and ambitious side told her work- ing with animals couldn’t be more than a diversionary hobby.
She pursued social work and then got her MBA at Columbia. She settled in Fairfield County for the first time decades ago during her days as a hard-charging, up-and-coming General Electric executive. “I lived and breathed work. It was GE’s heyday; the Jack Welch era, and I loved it. If I wasn’t at my office, I was at the gym or sleeping.”
Things changed when Diana’s health began to mysteriously decline. In 1993, she was diagnosed with an extreme case of Lyme Disease that caused a cluster of devastating neurological issues. She spent several years virtually bedridden, unable to work and desperate to recover. Healing took years of curative trial and error. She took up the ancient Chinese discipline of Qigong, traveled to India and now declares herself, “a reformed Type A.”
She picked up her camera and turned her lens to landscapes and then animals as a way to connect to the exhilarating life she missed. “I am from this incredibly active family,” she explains. “And sometimes, looking through my lens was the only way I could participate in what was going on around me.”
In 2011, she felt well enough to begin photographing animals full-time. While she takes commissions from zoos and ventures outdoors whenever she can to document animals in their natural habitats, it’s her work capturing what she calls “animal love stories” in her studio that has become her signature. “We all zip around so much,” she says. “I prefer to focus on what matters.”
Her workspace is outfitted with expansive panels curated from her sittings; each comes with a story that has left an imprint on the photographer. There is a golden retriever nuzzling with a newly expectant mother. “She didn’t think she could have children, and he was always there for her. You can see the closeness; how important they are to each other.” There is the proud owner beaming as she holds her puppy toward Diana’s lens; the portrait was a birthday gift from the woman’s husband. “She has it hanging over her bed,” says Diana. “She says she always hates her pictures, but she loved this one.”
And, of course, there are mesmerizing portraits of Diana’s German shepherd and poodle mix, Luka Longlegs, frolicking with Lucie. Now a middle-schooler, Lucie experienced significant trauma as an infant and has several physical limitations, including partial paralysis on one side. Diana says Lucie is thriving at her Fairfield school, and her home studio makes it possible for her to work and parent with ease.
“I feel like my connection to animals made it possible for me to be able to welcome her into my life as an older, single mother,” she says of adopting Lucie when she was 52. “The animals and this work helped heal me so we could find each other.”
Motherhood has also made her approach her work with more intense appreciation for those poignant, fleeting moments she finds behind her lens. “Animals are a gateway to our deeper connection to nature, our children, our families and ourselves,” Diana says. “What I really love is helping people remember the joy and gratitude that they have for their pets as well as for each other.”
Behind the Lens
Diana travels for special commissions but prefers to work in her studio whenever she can. Her process begins with a long “discovery call” where she talks to family members—often several of them—about the pet they’ll be posing with and their relationship. “It helps me understand the story we want to tell,” she says.
During a session, the focus is on making her clients feel relaxed and natural in front of the camera. “We play music, get hair and makeup done, make sure their pet is happy and then let the magic happen,” she says. “No one is rushed. It’s a day for them.”
Diana charges a $399 sitting fee, but that base price is a starting point. Commissions can cost from several hundred to several thousand dollars depending on the scope of the project and what her clients choose to order. Her specialties include curating beautifully bound “Love Story” books as well as gallery-quality wall-hangings that often feature multiple images from a session.