It’s time for Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek’s tail-wagging annual calendar reveal

We covered the llamas, the cats, the Afghan hounds and the guinea pigs. With what feels like an annual holiday at It’s Nice That, we’re yet again celebrating Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek and his kooky calendars as they never fail to entertain us. For 2022, Gebhart de Koekkoek has put together doggystyle (sorry, mum), 12 brilliant images of dogs doing a range of totally mundane tasks.

Hilariously, each dog is profiled; for example, we meet Ragna in March, who is the “most friendly and lazy dog on Wall Street,” and Bertha, August’s star, lives in Kreuzberg and “microdoses her soup before going to Berghain”.

Since Daniel is the “happy dog-owner of Limo (Mr. October),” he gets daily inspiration from his furry friend. “We already worked together on several projects before (panorama dog, tattoo dog) and appreciate the creative exchange between us,” Daniel says of the seemingly fruitful creative partnership between himself and Limo – who, in the calendar, sits on a rowing machine.

“For the calendar, it’s the same every year,” claims Daniel. “I collect and trash ideas until November.” It is only until November that Daniel knows he really needs to get a move on: “time pressure serves me with a new idea I fall in love with and I push through. Last year it was guinea pigs, this year it’s dogs. Same same but different,” he continues.

When he’s not working on calendars, Daniel says he’s “super happy with the ongoing collaborations I do with Helmut Lang, Moon Boot and Arte. I really love to stay with a client for the long-term and develop together from project to project.” The photographer has worked with publications like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Monocle, Condé Nast, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, and Time magazine. As well as working for Apple, Adidas, Audi, BMW, Helmut Lang, Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Zalando and more. Basically, he’s making us all feel pretty unaccomplished.

With all this commercial work and managing to find the time to create these calendars every year, Daniel must be inundated with inspiration and a brain whirring at top speed. So what inspires Daniel daily? “Sadly, everything. I can not look away or stop listening,” admits the artist, “even if I don’t want to see or hear anything. That's exhausting,” he claims. Next, Daniel will be taking some much needed time off, after saying he works 24/7 all year long. But that’s not before finishing “a little book project called “Shitbather”. And I'm planning to go to Milan to watch the supersize Moon Boot billboard I shot recently.”