An early exponent of conceptual art, Wegman’s first works were performance-based. These included throwing radios from a roof and floating Styrofoam letters along the Milwaukee River. In 1969, his work was included in Harald Szeemann’s influential exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form in Bern, shown alongside artists such as Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman. Wegman initially began making photographs and films as a means of documenting these ephemeral performances, though the camera quickly became central to his practice. In 1987, he returned to photographing dogs using a 20×24 inch Polaroid camera, continuing to work extensively with the Polaroid format from 1979 until 2007.

William Wegman was born in Massachusetts in 1943. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1967. He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and his work has been exhibited internationally. Early recognition came with his inclusion in When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta V, followed by a major retrospective organised by the Kunstmuseum Lucerne in 1990, which travelled to institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. More recent exhibitions include Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); Being Human, the central exhibition at Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles (2018), which toured to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand; Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano; and Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Hague (2019); and Favorite Models at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2024). In 2025, his work was included in The Photography of William Wegman: Experimentation and Representation at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York; Time Travelers: Photographs from the Gayle Greenhill Collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; and A Journey in America at Fleiss-Vallois, New York. Wegman lives and works in New York and Maine.