William Wegman, MFA ’67, bought his first dog in California after responding to an ad in a Long Beach, Calif., newspaper that said, “Weimaraners $35.” He called the new pet Man Ray. Wegman had trained as a painter, but as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1960s, he abandoned the medium, he says, due to the popular notion at the time that painting was dead. He turned his attention to photography and video, and the dog kept wandering into his shots.