MANHATTAN, SPRING 1970 — Man Ray was restless. Raised within romping distance of a Santa Monica beach, the spry Weimaraner was “being tortured by 6th Avenue and 27th Street.”

Then one day, Man Ray was in the back seat when William Wegman spotted a beech tree and said “beach.” The dog’s head corkscrewed. And Wegman had an idea. A video. A spelling lesson with Man Ray listening patiently as Wegman reviews the dog’s spelling errors. A star was born. Two stars, really, one a trained artist, the other a delightful dog.

As Instagram proves, many dog owners consider their pooches photogenic. Dog photos, surpassed only by cat candids, saturate social media. But there is only one William Wegman.

Since the 1970s, when he took a hiatus from painting to photograph Man Ray, Wegman has been “the guy who makes large, colorful photographs of dogs.” But while it’s easy to dismiss Wegman as “the dog guy,” critics know better.

“Dogs or no dogs,” the New York Times wrote in 2006, “Mr. Wegman is one of the most important artists to emerge from the heady experiments of the 1970s.”

Anyone can snap photos of their beloved Rover or Fido (or my own Mavis — above), but Wegman blends a wry sense of humor with an artist’s visual vocabulary, creating images that are clever, charming, and somehow, even with dogs, human.

“It’s not all about the dog,” Wegman told Paris Review, “but it is, too. The dog is definitely the muse here.”

Growing up in western Massachusetts, Wegman had the usual pets, yet he never considered himself a “dog person.” Instead, he was a painter whose early work was displayed in museums across America and Europe. Painting, however, “was dead in the Sixties,” so Wegman returned to an earlier love — photography. He had no dogs yet.

When he moved to Southern California, Wegman promised his wife a dog. “I didn’t want a dog but a deal was a deal.” He soon saw a newspaper ad: “Weimaraners — $35.” He came home with a six-week old pup in his arms. He named the dog after a surrealist photographer.

Man Ray was “a dog that did not really think of himself as a dog.” The pup followed Wegman everywhere, even into his studio. “And as soon as I pointed a camera at him, he was just transfixed, and really happy. So I pursued that very very delicately. I didn’t want to be a dog artist.”

But that first video, “Spelling Lesson,” caught the art world by surprise and led to others. In “Dog Duet,” two Weimaraners stare at the camera, then lift their eyes as one, tracking left, right, up, down. Finally, Wegman shows the camera the secret — a tennis ball. Along with videos, Wegman began taking stills of Man Ray in costume.

In dog-sated America, Man Ray was soon famous. In 1982, The Village Voice named the dog “Man of the Year.” Alas, Man Ray died that year and Wegman went back to dogless photography. Then in 1986, he got another Weimaraner and another star was born. Fay Ray.

Wegman had mostly worked in black and white, but Polaroid invited him to try out its large 20 x 24 color camera. Wegman discovered that grey Weimaraners provide the perfect contrast to colored costumes, chairs, and backgrounds. And when Fay had puppies — Battina, Crooky, and Chundo — the dogs took over.

On through the 1990s, Wegman devised endless variations on a canine theme. Wegman, said his second wife Christina, “has a million ideas a minute.” At first, Wegman sketched his ideas before leading his dogs into studios but improvisation became a better muse.

“People who have trained dogs say that I work very differently than most. I don’t speak to them, I use my hands.” Wegman’s studios seem like small kennels. Dogs roam freely through the usual art detritus while Wegman poses one dog or another, gently guiding the moment’s star into costume or onto a chair or pedestal. “Touch always works. It’s more like being sculptor than a dog trainer.”

As Fay Ray and her pups rose to fame, Wegman branched out. His videos had been among the first by any artist, and he made more, including a half-hour “Hardly Boys” mystery where dogs play all the roles. But Wegman’s Weimaraners also appeared in children’s books, calendars, on Sesame Street, even “Saturday Night Live.”

Wegman was careful “not to make them too cute.” Posing dogs might look easy, but his expansive creativity made it much more. Each photo, while capturing a dog’s bewildered or bemused look, is also masterfully composed. And each reflects everyday life, a sort of “Ozzie and Harriet” ordinariness, he says. But with dogs.

“I’m always reinventing art forms,” Wegman said. “I think, ‘Oh, this looks like Sol Lewitt with a dog. Or a Mondrian.” Some viewers are charmed, others amused, but Wegman is deadly serious. “I know some people when they dress up their dogs for Christmas, it’s a laugh riot, but I never laugh when I work with them.”

Fay Ray and her pups have passed on, preserved now only in Wegman’s photos, seen in museums from the Whitney and MoMA to the Pompidou in Paris. Wegman, now 82, is working with yet another generation of Weimaraners.

And the dog that started it all? Wegman will never forget Man Ray, “a powerful and noble dog.” Who just couldn’t spell. “It irked me sometimes to be known only as the guy with the dog, but on the other hand, it was a thrill to have a famous dog.”

WIT, WEIMARANERS, AND WEGMAN