Terry O'Neill, David Bowie with Jumping Dog, view 2, 1974

Terry O'Neill
David Bowie with Jumping Dog, view 2, 1974
Promotional photos for album 'Diamond Dogs', 1974
Lifetime edition gelatin silver print
16 x 12 inches

In David Bowie with Jumping Dog (View 2), 1974, Terry O’Neill captures Bowie at the height of his shape-shifting mid-70s creativity—cool, composed, and entirely in command of his own myth-making. Standing immaculate in tailored trousers and shirt, Bowie remains perfectly still as a German Shepherd leaps beside him—frozen in mid-air with a drama that feels both absurd and poetic.

The power of the photograph lies in that tension: Bowie as the calm, magnetic centre—eyes forward, spine straight—and chaos erupting within the same frame. O’Neill knew exactly what he was doing. He is not documenting an event—he is constructing an image that becomes the event.

The dog is airborne, teeth visible, body suspended in a gesture that should suggest threat—but Bowie never flinches. He doesn’t perform. He doesn’t lean into theatrics. His neutrality is the performance.

That is why this image has remained so enduring.

It encapsulates Bowie not just as a musician or celebrity, but as a being entirely outside the normal physics of reaction and expectation. O’Neill taps into the precise quality that makes Bowie Bowie: the ability to stand still and yet command the entire field of vision—no matter what chaos surrounds him.

David Bowie with Jumping Dog (View 2) is one of O’Neill’s purest studies in contrast: stillness vs. movement, glamour vs. danger, myth vs. reality. It is Bowie as architecture—not reacting to the world, but reshaping it simply by being present within the frame.