Charlotte Dumas, Patton, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York / Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam

Charlotte Dumas … she shoots horses, doesn’t she? She does. In 2006, Dumas, a young Dutch photographer, made portraits of racehorses in Palermo and Paris, indignant in their blinders and ropes. Dumas’s interest in animals, she says, is in showing how they “persevere and adapt in this human domain that they can’t escape,” and conversely showing how humans “use and regard animals for our own purposes, literally and symbolically.”

For her latest project, commissioned by the Corcoran, Dumas went to the stables of the U.S. army horses who pull the caissons carrying fallen soldiers to their final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery. These horses, Dumas notes, complete eight such “missions” every day, performing “a duty for mankind that dates back centuries.” In her photographs, though, they’re done with work. They appear in a rotund gallery, a stable of individual horses, each in its own darkness, each immersed its own psyche.

Dumas’s kind of animal attachment is a no-no in photography. Paul Roth, the curator of Anima (on view until October 28), noted in an interview that one of the first photography lessons he learned “is that you should never photograph an animal” — it’s too “romantic.”

 Charlotte Dumas, HSH, Palermo, Sicily, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York/ Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam

Clearly Dumas didn’t get that memo. Her vision has become progressively more romantic. In 2005, she photographed wolves, many from a distance, in the cool, flat light of Sweden and Colorado. In 2008, she crept closer, photographing homeless dogs in Palermo. In 2011, she made heroic portraits (not seen the this show) of the search and rescue dogs at Ground Zero.

As Dumas gets closer, what does she see? Consider her stray Sicilian dogs — black and white “Tom Tom,” eyeing something suspicious to his left; all black “Nivero,” aristocratically draped over marble steps; and a nameless fellow sitting in a cardboard box, fur poking out of the box’s heart-shaped hole, plastic bag on his head like a shower cap. Never mind the plucked heartstrings. You’re forced to think: What’s it like to be that dog? Dumas, like her compatriot Rineke Dijkstra, honors both the type, in this case the stray Sicilian dog, and the individual.

With her portraits of funeral horses, Dumas has gotten so close that she almost seems to be trying to crawl inside the horses’ heads. She photographed them as they were falling asleep: You’d think this would yield something intimate, but the opposite is true. In the darkened stables, something utterly remote and unknowable comes through — total equine absorption.

 by Sarah Boxer