The Dogist’s first follower was Oreo, a dog who saved his life in Narberth. Now he has 10 million more on social media.

The legend of how Elias Weiss Friedman became The Dogist began when he was 2 years old. The dog photographer-to-be had walked away from his grandmother’s Narberth home, wandering dangerously close to a busy intersection.

His parents — who had left him at his grandmother’s while house hunting — returned to find a fire engine in the driveway and police searching the neighborhood for the missing child.

“I was just imagining him on the milk carton,” said his mother, Marisa Weiss, who was pregnant with Weiss Friedman’s two younger siblings at the time. “I thought he was dead.”

But there was little cause for concern. Oreo, his grandmother’s black Lab, accompanied the meandering toddler. After 20 minutes of parental panic, boy and dog were spotted, perilously close to speeding Montgomery Avenue traffic.

But every time he tried to walk into the street, the dog herded him back on the sidewalk, making sure her best friend was safe and sound.

“That was the first time a dog saved my life,” said Weiss Friedman, now 37, while walking Elsa, his snow white Husky mix, strolling around the leafy Main Line neighborhood where he grew up.

“I’m revisiting my origin story,” he tells a family of fans — and their dog Harley — who spot him and ask: “Are you The Dogist?”

He is, and that question is common. Weiss Friedman’s blog, The Dogist, where he posts photos and videos of canines (and their humans) that he encounters on the street, has over 10 million followers across social media platforms. The majority are on Instagram, where he first started posting pictures in 2013.

The rock star of the dogosphere’s March wedding to Samantha Cutler, a fellow alum of Wynnewood’s Friends Central High School, where Weiss Friedman was a tennis star and photography prize winner, was covered in the Vows column of the New York Times.

Elsa, who wore a couture dress to the wedding — “She didn’t make a mess of her dress, or anywhere at the wedding,” reported Marisa Weiss — was the dog of honor.

Weiss Friedman has published three books. The first two were photo books, but the brand new This Dog Will Change Your Life is a serious and soulful journalistic memoir. It’s cowritten with Ben Greenman, who also writes books with another Philly celebrity with less than half as many Instagram followers as The Dogist: Questlove.

This Dog Will Change Your Life will bring Weiss Friedman, and many preselected presumably well behaved dogs, to the Theater of Living Arts on South Street Wednesday, for an event billed as “Dog Nation: An Evening with The Dogist.” All ticket holders get a copy of the book, which is dedicated to “Elsa, the Dog That Changed My Life.”

Weiss Friedman, who lives in Manhattan, has photographed more than 50,000 dogs since he was laid off from his corporate job and came up with the idea to do for dogs what street photography blogs like The Sartorialist and Humans of New York do for humans.

“I knew I had more creative juices in me, and it was a chance to do something different,” said Weiss Friedman.

His mother — a renowned oncologist who practices at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood and is the founder of breastcancer.org — wasn’t surprised that he went in a canine direction.

His empathy toward animals dates back to when he was in the womb, she says. “I was at a Christmas party at the primate house at the Philadelphia Zoo when I was pregnant with him,” she recalls. “I went into labor when the gorillas were beating their chest, and I had to be whisked away to the hospital.”

As a boy, he was quiet, often spending time alone with the family dogs, or his pet rats. When the family’s Black Lab, Ruby, had already chosen the future Dogist as her favorite, Weiss and her husband brought home a pug intended for their younger children. But once the pug met Weiss Friedman, the dog wouldn’t leave his side.

Weiss says that she has hung photos taken by her son in an exam room in her office at Lankanau, “and people fight over getting into the ‘dog room,’ they love it so much. It just gives me nachas,” she says, using a Yiddish word for joy or pleasure.

The Dogist “started as a spoof,” Weiss Friedman said, as he walks Elsa to the spot where he and Oreo found themselves on that fateful day. “It’s all coming back to me,” he said, jokingly. “It’s triggering my PTSD!” But seriously, the original Dogist idea was “wouldn’t it funny to make it seem like dogs knew what a camera was, and want to be portrayed like people do, because we anthropomorphize them anyway, right?”

The early Dogist photos were still photographs, with Weiss Friedman snapping images with a charm that recalls the work of Elliott Erwitt, one of his favorite street photographers. He took the photos with a Nikon 35mm camera at ankle height, wearing kneepads to soften the blow of the sidewalk.

The owners weren’t pictured. “It was very antihuman in a way,” he said. “I was a little jaded, because I just thought the internet was so vain, and it just made you feel inadequate and depressed. So the dogs were meant to be an antidote, something that is just pure joy and would restore your faith in humanity, rather than deplete it.”

It caught on immediately, with likes spiking into the hundreds, then thousands. It gave Weiss Friedman a sense of a mission, in capturing cuteness to warm the heart of dog lovers, and also to bring attention to dog adoption agencies to help animals find homes. “That was the second time dogs saved my life,” Weiss Friedman said.

“The Dogist” got a boost of popularity with the advent of TikTok. Weiss Friedman moved to a minute-long video format, where he’s followed by an assistant who records him spotting a Cane Corso or Pomeranian on the street, then asking people, “Excuse me, do a you mind if I take a photo of your dog?”

Nearly always, permission is granted, and a few quick questions about backstories and personality quirks get dog owners to talk about their favorite subject.

Most of the canine encounters are in New York, like his recent meetup with Bill Murray and Naomi Watts and Bing, their Great Dane costar in the movie based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend.

(Weiss Friedman earns his living through partnership deals with various brands, canine and otherwise, as well as book sales).

He also travels to take dog photos. He’s usually off duty when visiting family in Philly, but he has turned up, in recent months, causing a stir in Manayunk, Rittenhouse Square, and on South Street, where last month he snapped photos, met pawstruck fans, and fed Elsa a burger from Ishkabibble’s.

“Dogs aren’t your whole life,” is one of his favorite saying. ”But they make your life whole.”

The dog that did that for him is Elsa, who he rescued from a Texas shelter during the early years of the pandemic. It was the third time a dog saved became his life, he says.

Before then, he was “the dogless Dogist” without his own companion, “and a bit of a lost soul,” he said. “I didn’t understand that I deserved to be loved, and she changed that about me. She activated a part of my heart that I didn’t know was there and has made me into the mature, caring, responsible person I am.

“Dogs just manifest all these things that we put off and say we don’t deserve and they say, ‘You do deserve it.’ People are flawed, and dogs are pure of heart. So sometimes you need a dog to make it happen.”

📍 Theatre of Living Arts, 332 South St.; 📅 June 4, 8 p.m.; 🎟️ tlaphilly.com

📷 Love dogs and the stories behind them? The Dogist — known for its wildly popular Instagram feed and photo book series featuring pups and their people — comes to Philly for a live storytelling event. Expect heartwarming tales, behind-the-scenes moments, and special guests who help spotlight the human-animal bond.