There are two kinds of Serious Dog Lovers: those who clamor to volunteer at county animal shelters, and those who cannot stomach them.

The animals in county shelters can be pretty miserable. Yelps and whimpers echoing down the halls, bleachy antiseptics and the musk of panic in the air, cold hard floors, gray metal cages, and cells, full of healthy onetime loyal companions wagging their tails too hard, or worse, not at all, when a new person happens by — it is all too much for the faint of heart to bear.

Luckily, Marcos Javier Garcia, 36, a Miami lawyer and emerging photographer, is the shelter volunteer kind of dog lover. He steeled his nerves and offered himself to the Miami-Dade Animal Services Pet Adoption and Protection Center (known as MDAS) in 2015. The shelter, like most public animal adoption centers across the country, was overcrowded and overwhelmed. (Around 7.6 million animals enter shelters each year, and nearly three million never make it out.)

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Even after opening a gleaming new building last year, which is easier on both its animals and humans, the center has to triage its load of abandoned, injured and stray animals. Officials say they now save 90 percent of the over 27,000 animals that are brought in each year, more than ever. Yet that figure — and the numbers tend to vary, depending on who’s counting — that still suggests that the lives of more than 2,700 cats and dogs are cut short through no fault of their own.

Mr. Garcia, who turned his own dog, Obie, a black and white Dingo-like multi-breed, into an Instagram star (#obiethedingbat) saw an opportunity to volunteer beyond the usual ways. He was practicing and experimenting with a Leica Q. What better way to work on his black and white compositions — he had taught himself to use a manual SLR — than taking pictures at the shelter?

His photographic essay, which covers approximately six months of his time at the Miami-Dade shelter, began with a simple aim: “I originally intended to take portraits of the dogs and share them on social media,” he said, “hoping to solve the problem of dog oversupply one dog at a time.”

Static portraits, like the kind used on adoption sites, failed to bring the animals or their circumstances to life, he thought. So he began documenting scenes at the shelter instead.

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Dogs and cats are celebrated on social media, and a pageant — the Westminster Dog Show — makes headlines every year. But the images in his series are not meant to be sweet or cute. Mr. Garcia is conveying the limitations and stresses of shelter life. A tender moment of a dog reaching through its cage to touch Mr. Garcia’s hand, or poking a nose through a wire fencing in greeting, reveals more about the dog and the situation than a disconnected portrait, he found. His favorite image is almost abstract: a dog, barely visible save for the tail poking through its kennel gate, turned away from the world.

“It’s the whole story in the most minimal parts,” he said. “The dog is facing away from the kennel gate, which sometimes happens, especially with new dogs.”

Especially dear to him, and heavily represented in his essay, are pit bulls. Segregated from the rest of the shelter animals, they are typically doomed to die unless an out-of-county adopter or, more likely, an animal rescue group, saves them. The breed, one of the most plentiful in shelters across the country, is banned by law in Miami-Dade. Owning a pit bull is punishable by a $500 fine and confiscation.

Another aspect of shelter life Mr. Garcia wanted to document was the intake, when dogs are unloaded from vans and “processed.”

“Working as a volunteer — guiding people through the aisles looking for lost dogs, assisting people in viewing and adopting dogs, riding along with animal control cops and, what was worse, watching people surrender dogs to the shelter after signing a document advising them their dog may be euthanized — all of this gave me a firsthand perspective on what drove this problem: Supply outstripped demand,” Mr. Garcia said. “The economics of the shelter dog reality are as cold as its consequences. Given the finite amount of space to house the unwanted dogs, sometimes over 100 a day, harsh decisions must be made as to which dogs live and which dogs die.”

While the essay is an artistic expression, it is meant to do what Mr. Garcia intended when he volunteered at the shelter: help save some animals. Whether it works remains a question. Lens readers are the first to see it.

Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Marcos Javier Garcia is also on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.