*Top,* Tom Hanks in Santa Monica, 1993; *above,* the gang in Golden Beach, Florida, earlier this year.

Jane Gill in Squaw Valley, California, 1994.

*Top,* the gang in a freak August snowstorm at Little Bear Ranch, in McLeod, Montana, 1992; *above,* the official meeting of the Montana Rolleiflex Camera Club, at Little Bear Ranch, 1997.

A Labrador at Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, U.K., 1995.

Rob and Little Bear at Bear Pond, in Adirondack Park, New York, 1990.

Brooke Astor at home in Briarcliff Manor, New York, 1993.

Blue, photographing the dog wedding for *Vogue* in Miami, 1998.

The Gang’s All Here

The first collection of Bruce Weber’s golden-retriever shots celebrates the dogs who never leave the photographer’s side, otherwise known as “the gang”

By Mitch Glazer

Photographs by Bruce Weber

My mother was killed in a Dixie Highway car accident in Miami 15 years ago this month. My wife and I spent that awful “holiday season” living in Bruce Weber and Nan Bush’s Golden Beach guesthouse while I handled my mom’s funeral arrangements and spent days with my father as he fought for his life in Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Bruce and Nan and their extended family of sweet and loving golden retrievers kept us functioning in the pain-blur of those weeks. Bruce and his pack would troop down Golden Beach to love us up every morning before my wife and I left for the hospital. The shaggy and soulful retrievers bounded around us on the sand, nudging us with their big, leonine heads, gazing up at us with knowing, heavy-browed, concerned faces, reassuring us that joy and silly fun still existed outside the grim I.C.U. And there was Bruce, chiding, loving, and—like Tolkien’s shape-shifter bear-man, Beorn—part man, part golden retriever, alpha of the pack.